The announcement itself was one sentence long. On Friday 16 October 1998, six months after the Good Friday Agreement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded that year’s Peace Prize to John Hume and David Trimble “for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland.” Francis Sejersted, the Committee’s chairman, announced it in Oslo at eleven o’clock local time, ten o’clock in Ireland.
In Derry, the SDLP leader was at home in West End Park. A small group in the street watched him take the call at the phone table, then saw his thumbs-up. Later, in front of the cameras, he called the prize “a very powerful international approval of the peace process.”
The Ulster Unionist leader, who had turned 54 the day before, heard the news before dawn in Denver, Colorado, on an investment tour. His first words were careful: “We know that while we have got the makings of a peace, it is not wholly secure yet. I hope it does not turn out to be premature.”
Radio and television had the Friday. The Saturday papers set it in type, and a good many people kept them.
The morning Oslo named two men
The Committee’s press release was brief. The conflict, it said, had cost “over 3,500 people their lives.” It called Hume “the clearest and most consistent of Northern Ireland’s political leaders in his work for a peaceful solution.” It said Trimble “showed great political courage when, at a critical stage of the process, he advocated solutions which led to the peace agreement.” It also credited “other Northern Irish leaders” and the British, Irish and American governments.
Reaction followed familiar lines. Tony Blair said there could be “no more worthy winners.” Gerry Adams, who had been tipped as a possible winner himself, said the award would be an incentive to the peace process. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists called it a “farce”, and Paisley said that without decommissioning it rested on a “phoney peace”. It was Northern Ireland’s second Peace Prize, after the one awarded to Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams of the Peace People for 1976.
Hume went on to a long-standing engagement with two Belfast schools, stepping off the podium to take a call from the White House. By evening he was on his way to Dublin for The Late Late Show. In Denver, Trimble was heading for the airport. “I’m going home!” he told reporters.
Two roads to Good Friday
John Hume was born in Lower Nassau Street, Derry, on 18 January 1937. He was a teacher and a community organiser, with a founding role in Derry Credit Union, before he was a politician. On 5 October 1968 he was on the banned civil rights march that the RUC batoned off Duke Street in front of the television cameras. The next day he co-founded the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee to organise non-violent protest. He was elected to Stormont in 1969, helped found the SDLP in 1970 and served in the power-sharing Executive of 1974. In 1979 he became both an MEP and leader of his party. He later opened talks with Gerry Adams, in the words of his Nobel biography, “with the stated objective of bringing an end to violence.”
David Trimble was born in Bangor, Co. Down, on 15 October 1944. He took a first-class law degree at Queen’s University Belfast and taught law there through the 1970s and 1980s. He entered politics with Vanguard in 1975, later joined the Ulster Unionists, and won Upper Bann in 1990. In July 1995 he walked with Ian Paisley at the head of the Orange parade from Drumcree down the Garvaghy Road. In the BBC’s judgement, that helped him win the party leadership that September. Within three years he was leading unionism into an agreement.
In Oslo, Sejersted quoted Seamus Heaney’s way of putting the difference between them. Hume was “the hedgehog, who knew the big truth that justice had to prevail.” Trimble was “the fox, who has known many things”, with “the intellectual clarity and political courage to know that 1998 was the time to move unionism”.
The agreement was reached at Stormont on Good Friday, 10 April 1998. On Tuesday 19 May, at a U2 and Ash concert for 2,000 sixth-formers in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall, Bono introduced both leaders as “two men who have taken a leap of faith out of the past and into the future.” Neither man spoke. They shook hands and stood for a moment’s silence for the victims of the Troubles. On 22 May, 71 per cent voted Yes in Northern Ireland and 94 per cent in the Republic. On 1 July, Trimble was elected First Minister (Designate).
George Mitchell, who chaired the talks, put it most simply: “Without Mr. Hume, there would have been no peace process, without Mr. Trimble, no agreement.”
August, and the shadow over the summer
On Saturday 15 August 1998, a Real IRA car bomb exploded in the centre of Omagh, Co. Tyrone. Twenty-nine people were killed, and unborn twins with them. Nine of the dead were children. Three generations of one family died. The dead were Catholic and Protestant, from both sides of the border, and two were visitors from Spain. Hundreds more were injured. It remains the worst single atrocity of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Four days later, Buncrana in Co. Donegal buried three of its boys after a funeral Mass at St Mary’s Church. Thousands came, far more than the town’s population. President Mary McAleese was there, along with Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Seamus Mallon and David Trimble. Bishop Séamus Hegarty welcomed Trimble and Mallon and told them: “We are relying on you and on your colleagues in the Assembly to continue to build on the gains which have been made.” The Independent’s reporter recorded prolonged applause, both inside the church and outside it.
Trimble was an Orangeman, and attending a Catholic Mass later led to moves within the Order to discipline him. He said he had acted in a “charitable spirit” and that it was “the Christian thing in those circumstances.”
That August was still close in October, and still close in December.
Oslo, 10 December 1998
The prizes were presented at Oslo City Hall at lunchtime on Thursday 10 December, before an audience that included the King and Queen of Norway. Pat Hume and Daphne Trimble sat in the front row with their children.
It was the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Hume called the coincidence “a sort of poetic fulfilment.” He told again the story of standing on the bridge between Strasbourg and Kehl in 1979, France on one side and Germany on the other, and drew from it the idea at the heart of his politics: “Difference is of the essence of humanity.” He closed with Martin Luther King: “We shall overcome.”
Trimble was drier, and funnier: “It is imperative that I take the medal home to Northern Ireland – if only to prove that I have been to Oslo.” Then he was strikingly candid. “Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for catholics.” Northern nationalists, he went on, had “seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.” He spoke of “the reward of a race run while the race is still not quite finished,” and he ended: “And tomorrow is now another day.”
Sejersted didn’t pretend otherwise. “We all know that major problems still lie ahead,” he said, calling the new foundations “brittle”. But “the work along the way,” he argued, “is just as important as the finishing touch.”
In March 1999, Hume gave his half of the prize money, close to £300,000, to charity. Its income went to the Society of St Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army, “charities with roots in each community,” as RTÉ put it, and the balance to the Omagh Fund and a victims’ memorial trust.
John Hume died in Derry on 3 August 2020. David Trimble died on 25 July 2022.
What the Saturday papers held
Oslo announced the prize on a Friday morning, so the Friday belonged to radio and television. Two years later, Sonia O’Sullivan’s silver medal in Sydney followed the same pattern: the country lived it first, and the papers caught up the next day. For the Nobel, that day was Saturday 17 October 1998. The Irish Times ran reports from Belfast and Denver, along with an editorial that began: “Irish people should be proud that Mr John Hume and Mr David Trimble have been chosen as recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.”
We won’t invent other front pages; headlines are a job for the archive. What was reported is clear enough: a joint prize; Hume cheered in Derry; Trimble in Denver, honoured but cautious; the DUP’s objection; tributes from London, Washington and Áras an Uachtaráin; and the question of whether it was all too soon. Local weeklies in Derry, Donegal and Tyrone would have carried the story in their next issue. In December, Friday 11 December 1998 is the print record of Oslo.
A Nobel laureate is given a medal and a diploma. The rest of the country got a Saturday paper with a masthead and a date, and plenty of people put it in a drawer.
A page from that autumn
A prize goes to the people it names. A newspaper from the same day belongs to everyone who was there.
If you married on the weekend of 16 October 1998, or someone you love was born that Friday or the Saturday after, the paper from that date carries their story alongside the country’s. The Newspaper Book – Anniversary Gift and the Newspaper Book for Milestone Birthdays reproduce the complete edition from that date, bound in leatherette at Kennys Bindery in Galway, with the name embossed on the cover. You can choose a national title, the Belfast Telegraph or The Irish News, or a local paper such as the Derry Journal (for a weekly, the first issue after the date). The same applies to 10 and 11 December 1998, the week of Oslo.
For a hall or a study, a framed newspaper page from Saturday 17 October 1998 is a quieter choice: the masthead and the date, exactly as they were printed.
If you’re looking up a date this October
Twenty-eight years on, 16 October falls on a Friday again. For anyone born, married or just starting out in the week of the announcement, or the week of Oslo, those papers hold their own date as well as the country’s.
The peace was unfinished, and both men said so, one in Derry and one in Denver, and both again in Oslo. The papers printed that too, and the pages have lasted.
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