We have long had emigration in Ireland. But the nature of emigration has changed. With ferries to Britain and the continent, as well as air travel, emigration isn't the cut­off it used to be. In addition, some of our young people are being educated to levels beyond our present capacity to provide the jobs they are qualified to do. So they go abroad. Many want to come back, especially when they have children they would want to be raised in the Irish society and in the Irish educational system.

Maybe this society, if anything, has become more patriarchal, and that has to be combated.

We need to understand that we need to get the work-life balance better for both men and women - by men taking on more of those roles of homemaking and child rearing - it's an important area that we still haven't got right. I do worry; it's not just in the United States, it's also in parts of Latin America.

We will not let governments off the hook. We will look to civil society to help us, to pin governments, to what they have committed to here. And we will report on it.

The question now is how best to help the Iraqi people build a democratic and free Iraqi society that ensures respect for the rights of all Iraqis.

When globalisation means that many of the services that individual governments used to have direct power over are privatised, in education and health, even prison services, nonetheless national sovereignty still needs to be exercised.

The fifth province is not anywhere here or there, north or south, east or west. It is a place within each of us. It is that place that is open to the other, that swinging door which allows us to venture out and others to venture in.