Christian fundamentalists seek to roll back women's right to choose in the United States, and then also insist that money against Aids must not go to organisations that help people obtain their reproductive rights. These are extremely worrying trends.

Feel empowered. And if you start to do it, if you start to feel your voice heard, you will never go back.

I don't think we in Ireland have to follow slavishly what other countries have done. Ireland has its own strengths - in family life, in the local community, in the concept of meitheal, a very traditional form of cooperation in rural Ireland. Three or four or five neighbors get together, exchanging labor, farm equipment, and so on. There are strong solidarity overtones. That tradition is being translated today into community self-development.

I'm a very wide reader. I read serious books and I read airplane, forgettable books. I never have fewer than four or five books beside my bed at night. I particularly enjoy reading about people who have gone through a personal growth.

In human rights theory it is very important that governments still have the primary responsibility for the standards and provision of such services even if they no longer deliver them. They must insist that the private sector delivers without discrimination. So governments still have responsibility, including the need to influence business.

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

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.