So the latest Nobel peace prize laureate is a Bilderberger. Ha! And there we were thinking a week would go by without a conspiracy theory.

For those not in the know, the Bilderberg Group is a clandestine, elite assembly of movers and shakers in business, politics, media and education. Since 1954, they have been meeting once a year at an exclusive resort somewhere in the world (this year's meeting was in Chantilly, Virginia; last year's was in Istanbul) and discussing international affairs. You can only attend by invitation, and the press are not welcome. Conspiracy theorists from both left and right favour the belief that they secretly run the world.

Martti Ahtisaari was, according to the internet (I know, I know), a regular attender at Bilderberg conferences in the 1990s, while he was president of Finland. The president of Finland, hmm. Not exactly a likely master of global shadow puppetry, you might think. Still, Ahtisaari presided over Finland's accession to the European Union in 1994, and after his presidency ended, his international diplomatic career certainly blossomed.

There is no better, or funnier, account of the Bilderberg Group than in Jon Ronson's Them: Adventurists with Extremists. Ronson describes standing in the heat outside the Caesar Park hotel in Sintra, Portugal, staring in amazement as Henry Kissinger, Conrad Black, David Rockefeller and Peter Mandelson rolled past.

Bill Clinton was invited in 1991, when he was still no one, and a year later won the US presidential election; Tony Blair went in 1993, a year before he became leader of the British Labour Party; Michael McDowell was reportedly at last year's meeting, exactly a week after losing his seat in Dublin South East and turning back into a political no one.

According to the internet (I know, I know), among those who attended this year's meeting were US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; former US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who left the World Bank under a cloud last year; EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes; Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve; AIB chairman Dermot Gleeson; European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet; and the chairmen of Royal Dutch Shell and Google and the Washington Post; oh, and Henry Kissinger, as always; oh, and, allegedly, Charlie McCreevy.

Of course, anyone who's anyone seems to be invited to Bilderberg meetings. (Well, anyone who's either exceedingly wealthy or influential, if those two terms are not mutually inclusive.) Interestingly, though, the Nobel committee is not in the habit of awarding the peace prize to shifty, behind-the-scenes organisers of a new world order. They tend to go for upfront, populist agitators, such as Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King, Yasser Arafat, John Hume, or Aung San Suu Kyi, none of whom has ever been to a Bilderberg meeting (especially not Yasser Arafat, God knows).

They also tend to choose more – how can this be phrased without denigrating Ahtisaari's achievements in Namibia and Kosovo? – more "illustrious" winners. After Friday's announcement, the Nobel website (Nobelprize.org) featured a mini-survey asking people if they were aware of Martti Ahtisaari's role in resolving international conflicts. Of the 1,700-odd people who had responded at the time of going to press, a slight majority (59%) were not. Perhaps the Nobel committee is worried that they might have embarrassed people with this year's peace prize, as they do so often with the literature prize, when the winner turns out to be someone you've never heard of even though they've been writing a book a year for the past 60 years.

Anyway, the awarding of the peace prize to a Bilderberger – albeit a Bilderberger who seems above reproach – is another missed opportunity. Many people had hoped that this year might be the year of the Israeli prisoner of conscience, Mordechai Vanunu, who once applied unsuccessfully for asylum in Ireland.

Vanunu spent 18 years in prison for treason after blowing the whistle on Israel's nuclear weapons programme in 1986. He has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize more than a dozen times by the previous winner, the late Polish physicist and anti-nuclear campaigner Joseph Rotblat. Though released from prison in 2004, Vanunu is still confined to Israel, is forbidden from entering the West Bank or Gaza Strip, and is not allowed contact with foreigners. So far, all he has done wrong is lift the lid on what is still the only nuclear power in the Middle East.

Still, I suppose, we should be thankful: at least they didn't give it to Bono.

etynan@tribune.ie

Diarmuid Doyle is on leave