I attended the bedside of a friend who was dying in a Dublin hospital. She lived her last hours in a public ward with a television blaring out a football match, all but drowning our final conversation.

A completely disrespectful photographer was asked to stop taking photographs, and then said, 'I've got what I want. What are you going to do about it?' How would you feel if somebody walked up and started taking your photograph? I don't think you'd be very happy.

I think there's a bit of the devil in everybody. There's a bit of a priest in everybody, too, but I enjoyed playing the devil more. He was more fun.

I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Everytime somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg".

This notion that Americans have. . . that they don't have to do anything other than be American in order to lead - that's very pervasive in the culture, it goes very deep into how they see themselves here.

I still cannot fathom how difficult it was for the women I met to find out that they were HIV-positive. It is such a courageous undertaking in countries where there is still considerable stigma about the disease. They got tested to ensure that their unborn babies would have a chance of life by being born free of the virus.

Every minute of every day, a child under 15 is infected with HIV - the overwhelming majority of children under 15 who are HIV-positive get infected through their mothers at birth. Without treatment, half of these children die before they reach their second birthday.