Membership in the European Community, now the European Union, has helped Ireland to take its place as a European country with all the member states, including Britain. It has therefore helped the maturing of a good bilateral relationship with Britain, lifting part of the burden of history.

If you are small and don't particularly want credit for what you are doing, you can achieve a lot.

I want to see a UN that enables a gathering of energies in which business plays its proper role.

A culture is not an abstract thing. It is a living, evolving process. The aim is to push beyond standard-setting and asserting human rights to make those standards a living reality for people everywhere.

Human rights are inscribed in the hearts of people; they were there long before lawmakers drafted their first proclamation.

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.

We need to be prepared to have multi-stakeholder, well-managed partnerships. That can be very effective. We saw this happen at international level with the UN Convention on Landmines, for example, where some governments didn't want to go forward, but enough governments did and with them many NGOs. At international level we need to see this as the 21st century way of doing things.