In 1995, an unassuming man from South Derry, a rural Catholic and farmer's son, won the Nobel Prize for Literature almost 30 years after he published his first book on poetry. Born in Mossbawn in 1939, Seamus Heaney joins other literary giants such as Yeats, Beckett and Shaw. Heaney has described his work - "Poetry grows like a moss inside you and at certain times you start picking it off. You can't sit down and do it just by willing it." Following ceasefires, Heaney wrote an article in a Scottish newspaper in which he stated that cessation of violence is an opportunity to open a space in the first level of each person's consciousness - a space where hope can be developed and grow. Hope, he said, is a state of the soul rather than a response to evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out." Heaney also has said, "When the ceasefires were announced, there was an ! open if uncertain future ahead, just as there was a dark past behind." Today, the future of Ireland seems brighter than ever. A CHORUS Human Beings Suffer, They torture one another, They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong, Inflicted and endured. The innocent in gaols Beat on their bars together. A hunger-striker's father Stands in the graveyard dumb. The police widow in veils Faints at the funeral home. History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles And cures and healing wells. Call miracle self-healing: The utter, self-revealing Double-take of feeling. If there's fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry Or new life at its term. It means, once in a lifetime That justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme. -- "A Chorus" from "The Cure at Troy," 1990