Since Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, Irish people have been among the winners for their work in literature and physics, and for peace. There have been four Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature; three previous winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, and one winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics. (The other categories are chemistry, economics, and physiology/medicine.) The Irish Nobel prize winners' roll-call is:

Peace Prize

Sean MacBride (1974), statesman, politician and lawyer, won the prize for his campaigning on human rights, principally as chairman of Amnesty International. It was jointly awarded, as the Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sato was honoured for his anti-nuclear policies.

Betty Williams Mairead Corrigan (1976), leaders of the Peace People, were honoured in recognition of their attempt to overcome sectarian strife in the North. The cross-community movement was set up after the death of three children - Mairead Corrigan was their aunt - after they were struck by an IRA gunman's runaway car in west Belfast.

Prize For Literature

William Butler Yeats (1923), poet, won when his international reputation was well established though it was the later publication of The Tower (1928); The Winding Stair (1933) and Last Poems (1939) which made him one of the greatest English language poet of the 20th century.

George Bernard Shaw (1925), dramatist, critic and iconoclast, was hailed as the leading playwright of his time. The decision to honour his play Saint Joan with the prize was vindicated, as his prolific output did not wane, and he remained one of the most important and persistent voices of this century.

Samuel Beckett (1969), enigma and leading exponent of The Theatre of the Absurd, was determined to force the meaning of language, reflected in his decision to write in French. Waiting for Godot and his remarkable trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable , produced in both French and English during the 1950s, assured his literary immortality.

Seamus Heaney (1995), poet, won the prize "for an authorship filled with lyrical beauty and ethical depth which brings out the miracles of the ordinary day and the living past".

Prize For Physics

Ernest Walton (1951), atomic physicist and native of Dungarvan, Co Waterford, was honoured with the English scientist Sir John Cockroft for their pioneering of the use of accelerated particles in the study of nuclei in atoms. The instrument they used to "split the atom", the Cockroft-Walton accelerator, is still used in atomic physics.

The Austrian Erwin Schrodinger, perhaps the most distinguished scientist to work in Ireland during the 20th century, shared the Nobel prize in 1933 for his application of wave-equations to quantum mechanics.