Hugging trees has a calming effect on me. I'm talking about enormous trees that will be there when we are all dead and gone. I've hugged trees in every part of this little island.

For over 30 years, the IRA showed that the British government could not rule Ireland on its own terms.

We can be revisionist, and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time.

One man's transparency is another's humiliation.

I think there is a huge responsibility upon governments to understand the consequence of their decisions.

If you militarise a situation, you beg for an armed response.

A real possibility now exists for a Government that is not led by either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil