The fight for human rights is about speaking truth to power.

I think that we have refined greatly our notions of sovereignty in the EU. Its members consider themselves to be sovereign governments, but they have ceded a part of their sovereignty to the Union level, and their sovereignty is now penetrated by EU law.

I was elected by the women of Ireland, who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system.

The United Nations is actually a mid-20th century institution and much weaker than it was when it was originally created, because governments themselves are less capable of implementing the kind of promises or programs that they have put forward.

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

The term 'human rights' has been too often associated with conditionality, and with concerns of developing countries that in order to benefit from open trade they would be required to implement immediately labour and environmental standards of a comparable level to those applied in industrialised countries. At the same time, debates about the primacy of trade as against human rights legal codes have contributed to maintaining the unfortunate impression that the two bodies of law are pursuing incompatible aims.

It is a time when Irish women can link - as they are linking - through networks. They can do this through having an outward-looking attitude to what's happening to women in other countries, and by being affected by a broader debate.