N. Irishmen get Nobel Prize

OSLO, Oct 16 (AP) — Mr John Hume and Mr David Trimble today won the Nobel Prize for Peace for their efforts to resolve the three-decade-old northern Ireland conflict culminating in the peace agreement signed this spring.

They were cited by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for work towards ending the national religious and social conflict in northern Ireland that has cost over 3,500 people their lives.’’

"Mr John Hume has throughout been the clearest and most consistent of northern Ireland’s political leaders in his work for a peaceful solution,’’ the committee said in its citation.

"As the leader of the traditionally predominant party in northern Ireland, Mr David Trimble showed great political courage when, at a critical stage in the process, he advocated solutions which led to the peace agreement,’’ the citation said.

The committee also noted that the peace agreement that was signed in April was the work of other northern Ireland political leaders, as well as the governments of the United Kingdom, The USA and Ireland.

The prize of 7.6 million Swedish kronor (963,000 dollars) will be divided equally between Mr Hume (61) and Mr Trimble (54).

Mr Hume, contacted by Norwegian television NRK, said he believed the prize "will strengthen our peace process enormously.’’

That outlook was echoed by Norwegian Nobel Committee head Francis Sjerested, who said after the announcement the committee hoped the award would give "the peace process a push forward.’’

The Peace Prize was the last of the six Nobel awards to be named this year. The Economics Prize was won on Wednesday by Mr Amartya Sen, an Indian scholar for his work in studying the causes of famine and other catastrophes.

The prizes are presented on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who established the prizes in his will.

Crusader, hardliner share Peace Nobel

BELFAST, Oct 16 (DPA) John Hume, 61, founder and leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland, was a key figure on the middle ground of peace contacts for more than three decades.

As head of the largest Catholic Party, Hume was seen as a major influence in persuading the underground Irish Republican Army (IRA) to stop shooting and bombing and ensuring that the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, was party to negotiations.

Born on January 18, 1937, in Londonderry, the soft-spoken Hume was initially a school teacher and then an academic at Trinity College, Dublin. He returned to his hometown, which is called “Derry” by Catholics, to assume the leadership in 1968 of the civil rights movement.

Two years later he and other founded the SDLP to marshall mainly the middle-class votes. It favours a peaceful unification of Ireland and is the leading nationalist party with 24 per cent of the vote in the province at the 1997 general election.

Since the Good Friday accords, Hume has let his deputy leader Seamus Mallon take more of the limelight. Mallon rather than Hume has become Deputy First Minister of the province’s power-sharing executive.

A father of five, Hume has been a member of the European Parliament since 1979 while he has represented the Northern Irish constituency of Foyle in the British House of Commons since 1983.

Last year, Hume was a front-runner to be appointed President of the Republic of Ireland, but the post went in the end to another figure from Northern Ireland, women Proessor Mary Mcaleese.

In 1995, he was honoured as “European of The Year”, just one of numerous awards Hume has received for his efforts to broker a peace, between Protestants determined to retain links to Britain and Catholics seeking one Ireland.

Protestant leader who refused to tremble
Northern Ireland’s First Minister David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), is the pragmatist who this year persuaded the majority Protestant community in the province to accept the Good Friday peace accords.

To do so he needed solid hardline credentials. Trimble, aged 54, spent much of his life demonstrating his revulsion for what Protestants regarded as an attempt by the Catholic South to seize the North.

As an academic and head of the Law Faculty at Queens University in Belfast, Trimble was also a leading light in the Orange Order, a men’s society that upholds with grim determination the separate culture and traditions of the Northern Ireland Protestants.

He hit headlines around the world in 1995 when he insisted on an Orange Order march past a Catholic housing estate in the small town of Drumcree, demonstrating resolve to his own camp but provoking a riot by Catholics despite a huge police presence.

The Unionists rewarded him soon after when their leadership was up for grabs, and he replaced Jim Molyneaux, regarded by many in the party as too close to then British Prime Minister John Major.

Belfast-born, Trimble has been a UUP member of the House of Commons since 1990 after being active as a younger man in much more rightwing Northern Irish groups. His current marriage is his second and he has three young children.