Eminent playwright Brian Friel joked as he received the Aosdána's highest honour today that it was like being read the last rites.
Major artistic figures including writer Seamus Heaney, painter Louis le Brocquy and poet Theo Dorgan looked on as President Mary McAleese placed a golden Torc around Friel's neck as a symbol of being elected a Saoi in Aosdána.
The reclusive playwright, termed it an exclusive club, with only five other people in the country being appointed a Saoi at the same time.
"I asked one of them what was it about us that made us so special, so unique and indeed so magnificent. And to be a Saoi, he told me you have got to be very old, your career is as good as washed up and the end is just around the next bend in the road," the 77-year-old joked.
"In fact he said, you pulled a great trick, you went and had a stroke, so they probably felt safer to fast-track you to the top of the queue."
The writer, responsible for penning Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Translations, Dancing at Lughnasaand the Faith Healer, joked: "Then I knew that being made a Saoi, really getting this award is extreme unction, it is a final annointment. Aosdána's last rites."
Friel, whose plays have premiered at venues near and far including the Abbey Theatre, London's West End and Broadway, said the effects of extreme unction were considered in some cases to restore health.
"So if the President has done her job properly today, if she has got me well oiled in others words, after this I hope to give up those boring physio exercises that I do, throw away my stick and maybe even try to tap into that washed up creative life again," he said, to applause in the Arts Council offices in Dublin.
Friel, who was born in Omagh, Co Tyrone in 1929 but now lives in Co Donegal, co-founded the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry in 1980. The writer, who served in the Senate from 1987 to 1989, has published two collections of short stories as well as his catalogue of plays.
Mrs McAleese said she took a special pride in placing the golden collar around the neck of a man she called a great Northerner. "It is remarkable just looking around this room to think not only is he receiving the Saoi today but there is of course a certain theatre in Dublin that is well-packed at the moment as the Faith Healerruns a record run," Mrs McAleese said, as Hollywood actor Ralph Fiennes, the star of the Gate Theatre production, looked on.
In her tribute, Mrs McAleese said the writer had internationalised the borderland of Derry, Donegal and Tyrone in his powerful works. "He explores idealism, relationships, moods, emotions, hopes and disappointments with a breathtaking deftness which has seen him recognised around the world as one of the finest playwrights in the English language and a seminal influence on our Irish theatre, Irish thinking and importantly thinking about Ireland," she said.
"Through the most difficult terrain Brian has been a steady and a demanding Sherpa, a skilled leader, whose contribution to his art and to Ireland has been utterly, utterly outstanding," she said.
Aosdána, which was established by the Arts Council in 1981, elects a Saoi for sustained distinction in the arts following a vote by secret post by its 220 members.