Ireland is not in a good place at the moment. We have our own humiliation of losing our economic sovereignty, and we're now regaining it slowly and painfully.

I can see the immense capacity of business to give leadership.

The aim of human rights, if I may borrow a term from engineering, is to move beyond the design and drawing-board phase, to move beyond thinking and talking about the foundations stones - to laying those foundation stones, inch by inch, together.

Ireland is not in a good place at the moment. We have our own humiliation of losing our economic sovereignty, and we're now regaining it slowly and painfully.

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.

In general, I don't think that economic, social and cultural rights are primarily a matter of going to court. They are most useful today as commitments which can help ensure effective and equitable policy-making at every level.

Post-genocide Rwanda has managed to implement a good universal health insurance scheme that covers a large proportion of the population. This came about because of the severity of the country's problems and the resulting high proportion of women in the parliament and among professional caregivers, which had a positive effect on policy.