The honour bestowed on Brian Friel this week is due recognition for a playwright who not only is the great master of modern Irish drama but also the most popular and widely loved. Few contemporary dramatists have enriched the emotional and intellectual lives of audiences in the same way as he has with his storytelling for the stage.
Anyone lucky enough to see the current production of his play Faith Healer in Dublin's Gate Theatre will experience what his fellow playwright Tom Kilroy has described as "one of the great theatrical texts of our time in the English language". They will also encounter the reasons why he is our foremost dramatist: his outstanding powers as a sculptor of sublime language and nuance.
Since his emergence in 1964 with that classic exploration of a young man's need to escape from small-town Ireland, Philadelphia, Here I Come, Friel has been a pivotal force in the imaginative life of this country. Such has been the quality of his work that every so often there has appeared a new Friel masterpiece at which to marvel: Philadelphia, Translations, Dancing at Lughnasa and Faith Healer all stake a claim to greatness.
In her remarks at the ceremony marking Friel's election as a Saoi of Aosdána (the affiliation of Irish writers and artists), President McAleese got to the core of the playwright's genius as an artist when she said he had "fearlessly, but with pity, explored the chaotic maps by which our paths have been, and are, charted".
History - recent and past - and the tricks of memory, cultural flux and identity, as well as the social and psychological wounds left in the wake of colonisation, have been central preoccupations. In the creation of his mythic Donegal locale, Ballybeg - the setting for his major dramas - Friel has placed on the stage a microcosm of the larger Ireland that has been the focus of what the President referred to as his "scholarly forensic genius". Although he has remained loyal to that fictional Donegal heartland, his plays are a profound affirmation of the universality of good theatre.
Much has been said and written about Friel's adherence to a private and reticent persona, but what does that matter? He has directed the expression of his thoughts and ideas - for the most part - to the characters he has created for the stage.
He once revealed that his plays grow out of a willingness to "delve into a particular corner of yourself that's dark and uneasy". We should be grateful for his restless journeys into these spaces in his imagination - they have given us many nights of theatrical enthralment.