Mr John Hume spent the later hours of yesterday being congratulated by presidents, poets and pop stars.
He walked on to the Late Late Show in Dublin to be greeted by a prolonged standing ovation from the studio audience and telephone tributes from the great and the good.
The President, Mrs McAleese, speaking from Harvard, Massachusetts, was the first to be put through to Mr Hume. She said she and everyone around her congratulated Mr Hume "from the bottom of our hearts . . . hearts filled with delight . . . there is no one in this world that deserves this honour more than you".
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, followed in a video link from Cork. Mr Ahern recalled how Mr Hume had persisted through the civil rights campaigns of the late 1960s, the Sunningdale agreement, the New Ireland Forum, and his "much maligned" dialogue with Mr Gerry Adams. The Taoiseach also paid tribute to Mr David Trimble who "under very difficult circumstances" had "pushed his people forward".
Mr Adams phoned from Delaware to tell Mr Hume that he had earlier left a message of congratulations on his answering machine on winning what was "a very just reward for all your efforts". The award was also a "great honour" for Mr Hume's wife, Pat, and his family "and for David Trimble as well", Mr Adams said.
Bono was next on the line. Mr Hume was "more of a poet than a politician", a characteristic which gave him "great insight".
Mr Hume's fellow Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, provided the final phone tribute. He was "privately delighted and publicly exalted" for his old schoolmate.
And then, the laureate had to go, CNN were waiting in the next room and "I have a message that President Clinton is about to call me as well".
Mr Hume's parting words: "I always keep repeating myself - it's the old teacher in me, but I hope that in the future, the symbol of our patriotism will be the spilling of our sweat and not the spilling of our blood."
