For John Hume, travelling the road from Derry to Nobel success has taken vision, endurance, and nerve - nerve, perhaps, most of all. The 1993 period of Hume-Adams was the best and worst of times for John Hume. The best because it was the springboard for what we have now in the Belfast Agreement, the worst because of the vituperation heaped upon him for dealing with Sinn Fein and, by proxy, the IRA.

It shook him. He suffered, his family suffered, but he held steady. A locally told story explains the genesis of that single-mindedness.

At eight years of age, attending Rosemount primary school in Derry, he won a class prize worth half-a-crown, two shillings and sixpence, 12 1/2p in today's money, but serious money in 1945 - especially in a struggling Derry household of seven children and an unemployed father.

But there was a sting. Later in the day of his prize the headmaster came round to his class rattling a collection box for the "black babies". He put the box under young Hume's nose and commented, "I hear there's somebody carrying a lot of money here. I think the black babies will do well today."

The headmaster rattled the box, and the youngster stared ahead. The more the teacher rattled the box the more fixed was Hume's gaze on something else entirely in the classroom. This battle of wills went on for a seemingly interminable period, there was consternation in the class, but Hume - eight years of age remember - didn't flinch. His attitude was the half-a-crown would be more useful in his mother's hand, and the "black babies" would have to wait until better times. His mother got the half-crown.

His friends and enemies agree he is single-minded, although they might differ in their definition of that characteristic. Nationalists might choose words like courage and fortitude, whereas many unionists might prefer descriptions such as arrogant and infuriating. They all fit, to varying degrees.

The late US House of Representatives Speaker, Tip O'Neill, a friend of Hume in later life, famously said that all politics is local. It's a maxim Mr Hume has adapted to his own philosophy. Essentially, he's a bread-and-butter politician, but on a grand scale.

Many unionists will scoff, but he has never been married to an outmoded republican ideology or nationalist conviction. Educate people, get them jobs, build houses, put money in their pocket, give them dignity, put them on an equal footing with everybody else, then the old sectarian enmities will begin to crumble. Once equality is achieved, let history evolve as it will. That's still his philosophy.

After studying briefly for the priesthood in Maynooth, obtaining a BA (hons) in French and modern history, Hume took up a teaching post in Strabane, Co Tyrone, in the late 1950s. This was when he started putting his self-help theories into practice.

In the early 1960s he founded the Credit Union in Derry which now has 14,000 members and £21 million.

He was involved in several other local projects, such as a successful smoked salmon enterprise, and building 100 houses in 1965 through the Derry Housing Association when the unionist-controlled (and gerrymandered) Derry Corporation was building none.

Then came 1968 and the civil rights movement. Former Irish Times editor Douglas Gageby has recalled meeting Hume for the first time in Derry in 1968, and being impressed with his policy of persuading nationalists to contest injustices rather than merely carp about them.

Some people under 40, or perhaps more particularly under 30, will judge Hume on his involvement in the past 10 years of politics culminating in the Belfast Agreement, the referendums and the creation of the Assembly. They may see a politician who has played a crucial role in that tortuous political process, but a politician - with his repetitive language, dubbed "Humespeak" by his opponents - who at times can be didactic and occasionally irascible.

But for many more seasoned people the enthusiastic civil rights period of the late 1960s will be remembered as a time of youthful vigour and hope, and a time when Hume, newly entered into politics, was an inspiring figure. His language and method of challenging the status quo were fresh and exciting.

Thirty years on and the truth of Yeats's line that "too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart" was again proved correct. Hume, like Churchill, has his black dog of depression that follows him around from time to time. He has spent a number of periods in hospital for exhaustion, and has been warned repeatedly by his doctors to slow down.

The constant disappointments took their toll on his health and personality. This perhaps explains why he was briefly tempted to stand for the Irish Presidency. He realised in time, though, that he couldn't yet bow out of frontline politics.

Cumulatively, his commitment gradually paid dividends. While Sunningdale collapsed in 1974, Hume was making his mark; the idea of power-sharing and some form of North-South dimension to any settlement was lodging, however uncomfortably, in the unionist mind.

The proposals of the New Ireland Forum of 1983 were rejected out of hand by the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in her notorious "out, out, out" declaration - but two years later she too was moved to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement which gave Dublin a foot in the door to Northern politics.

By this stage Hume had taken over the SDLP leadership from Gerry Fitt. He was also an MEP, and lobbied exhaustively and successfully to win friends in Brussels and Strasbourg. He made powerful allies in the US, chiefly the "four horsemen", Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neill, Pat Moynihan and Hugh Carey (and later still President Clinton). Their influence strengthened the concept of peaceful "constitutional" Irish nationalism in the US and undermined the influence of Provisional groups such as Noraid.

His international networking also undermined the British government argument that the North was purely an internal UK matter. In the early 1990s, through the Brooke-Mayhew talks, he sold his concept of a three-stranded approach to the Northern conflict: that any settlement must cover internal Northern matters, North-South arrangements, and the British-Irish relationship.

Around this time too Hume was holding secret talks with the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams. Previous talks between the SDLP and Sinn Fein in 1988 had broken down, but contact continued behind the scenes, reaching a controversial conclusion in the Hume-Adams statements of 1993.

There was uproar. Unionist politicians, commentators such as Conor Cruise O'Brien and Eamon Dunphy in Independent Newspapers, the Progressive Democrats, and Democratic Left, turned on Hume with particular venom. Hume said he didn't care "two balls of roasted snow" about the criticism. But he did.

Hume - essentially a pacifist, who has always refused a licence for a personal protection weapon or an RUC armed guard - had to wrestle intellectually and emotionally with the morality of speaking to the IRA through Mr Adams.

This was an organisation which only in 1990 felt justified in using Patsy Gillespie as a human bomb in Mr Hume's own city of Derry, to blow Mr Gillespie and five British soldiers to eternity; and in October 1993, at the most difficult time of Hume-Adams dialogue, killed 10 people, including the IRA bomber, in the Shankill Road fish shop explosion.

The pressure on Mr Hume and his family was intense from inside and outside his party but - using the "black babies" anecdote as evidence - Mr Hume seemed genetically disposed to holding his nerve stubbornly. Of equal importance, he believed in Adams's sincerity.

Hume had the support of his wife of 38 years, Pat, and their five children. Pat Hume has been a rock in his life, and but for her dedication he could hardly have endured the past 30 years. Others also showed solidarity in horrific times.

And gradually there was movement. The Downing Street Declaration was published which, Hume is sure, was essentially modelled on the never-published Hume-Adams proposals. It spoke of Britain having no selfish, strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland.

The argument had changed. Hume contended that with this declaration the IRA could no longer claim it was fighting against the "British occupation of Northern Ireland", but that it was waging a sectarian war against unionists - whom republicans liked to claim were fellow Irish people.

This was a watershed in modern Irish history, and no one can gainsay that Hume played the most significant role in achieving this moment. The IRA took its time to respond, but eventually, in August 1994, it declared a ceasefire, which was followed six weeks later by a loyalist paramilitary ceasefire.

But everyone knew there were further high hurdles. Unionist demands for IRA disarmament and a weakened Tory government led by John Major, and depending on Ulster Unionist Party votes, stalled progress. The IRA ended its ceasefire, there was more despair, and more criticism of Hume.

But the dynamic remained. The election of Tony Blair leading a massive-majority Labour government provided the impetus for a renewed IRA ceasefire, and to activate the peace talks, which concluded last April in the historic Belfast Agreement.

Like most politicians, Hume has a considerable degree of vanity. Aged 61, the Nobel Prize is a highlight in his career, a fitting reward for his vision, his political and intellectual dedication to seeking a path out of the conflict, and for his tenacity.

His wife Pat hopes he will be able to wind down now. He began the process of gradual retreat from total politics when the Assembly was formed by standing aside for his deputy, Seamus Mallon MP, now the North's Deputy First Minister.

If the decommissioning hurdle can be overcome - and Hume and others believe it can - then the SDLP leader may be prepared to hand over more control to some of the younger bloods such as Mark Durkan, heir-apparent to his Foyle Westminster seat. He loves Europe and may be slower to vacate his European Parliament position.

With the Nobel prize in hand, Hume could concentrate on the international speaking circuit, maybe take up a lecturing role in a US university such as Harvard, or focus on his interest in local Derry history and spend more time with Pat and family in their Donegal holiday home in Inishowen.

He deserves time to rest on these, his latest and greatest laurels.