But across the north of Ireland the process is under way of moving beyond the mere toleration of difference – though that is a massive achievement – to embracing a diversity that is enriching and to be celebrated. If that is to continue, the work will be as much within communities as across them; in that, the work of thousands of individuals, of whom the odd couple Hume and Trimble are merely the exemplars, will be vital. If they succeed, perhaps the Nobel committee might award a prize to all of them Or perhaps, by then, they will have prize enough.. Corrymeela has therefore shifted its emphasis and has developed a series of exercises for working within individual religious and tribal groups which are bearing exciting fruits among ex-paramilitaries, rioting youths and members of the local security forces.There is much more to be done, of course. Prejudice, as the example of the Metropolitan Police so sadly testifies, resides in group dynamics even more than in the prejudices of individual bigots.

It was not enough, they have since realised, because it took no account of people’s nearly infinite capacity for making the exception. A racist may have one or two black friends – to whom he somehow accords the status of honorary whites – without shifting his underlying racism; in the same way mere contact does not destroy the stereotypes of religious tribalism in Ireland. That same intuition was evident yesterday in the new even-handedness in the tributes on the street and in the shopping malls to John Hume and David Trimble alike.One of the most striking insights of this new politics has come from Northern Ireland’s cross-religious Corrymeela Community. For years its peace and reconciliation workers have been bringing Catholics and Protestants together on neutral territory with the aim of allowing them to discover their common humanity. The sullen silence or lip-service condemnations of outrages against the other side had given way to something more open.

It did not just trigger memories of the callers’ own rankling pain, some of it stretching back a full three decades. It also articulated the extent to which there is emotional assimilation of the new political agenda which rejects paradigms that automatically equate nationalism with a particular geographical unit and unionism with the symbols of a Britishness which has all but vanished on the mainland. All these are merely symptoms of a far more profound change which can be detected in the people of the island.After 20 years of regularly visiting the north of Ireland I have begun to detect there a significant change in the warp and weft of daily discourse. It was there in the poignant radio-station phone-ins in the days after Omagh. Nor, even, was it simply the sight after the Omagh bomb of David Trimble at a Catholic funeral or Gerry Adams condemning a Republican outrage. But the breadth of the achievement in Ireland is illustrated by the fact that plausible cases were also made for giving it to Bill Clinton for his decisive contribution, to Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern for theirs, to Senator George Mitchell, who chaired the multi-party talks on the agreement for two years, to Mo Mowlam for her imaginative facilitation, and to Gerry Adams and the loyalist ex-paramilitary David Ervine, who have perhaps made the longest journey into political compromise for peace.Yet it is not merely the breadth of this endeavour which suggests to me that Northern Ireland may be sufficiently robust to resist the jinx of the peace award. This year there was a record number of 139 nominations, including Pope John Paul II, Vaclav Havel and Kofi Annan.