The award of the Peace Prize to John Hume and David Trimble has a kind of geological inevitability about it. The announcement of the news was not a surprise, but had the prize gone to any other quarter it would have been a deep disappointment.
When I knew John Hume at St Columb's College, Derry, in the 1950s, he already displayed the qualities that have led him to this new eminence. You had the impression of somebody with a very steady moral and intellectual keel under him, somebody reliable and consistent, who operated from a principled and definite mental centre.
The same qualities have distinguished him as a politician. He never seemed in a hurry, never spent time scoring points and always trusted the capacity of his political opponents as well as his constituents to take an extra trusting step.
It is a great personal pleasure for me to know that John has been honoured. He has stood his ground with integrity, and I hope that he and his wife, Pat, get the time for themselves in the next few weeks to take in the goodness of what has happened.
There is a parable about the fox and the hedgehog, which contrasts the kind of knowledge and basis for action which each creature possesses. The hedgehog, according to the story, knows one big thing; the fox knows many things.
In terms of this story, John Hume is the hedgehog, who knew the big truth that justice had to prevail. David Trimble is the fox, who has known many things, but who had the intellectual clarity and political courage to know that 1998 was the time to move unionism towards an accommodation with reasonable and honourable nationalist aspirations.
In so doing, he opened the possibility of a desirable and credible future for all the citizens of Northern Ireland and has entered history, as well of the ranks of the Norwegian Academy's peacemakers.
Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995