So can you explain the significance of somebody from the North being elected as a president for Ireland.

Yes, because quite apart from the fact that I was the second, the only time in history that a woman has succeeded a woman in a presidency, probably more important in many ways was the fact that I was the first person from Northern Ireland to be elected as president of the Republic.

More than that, I did not have a vote in my own election.

because, of course, I was living and working in Northern Ireland.

I was working in the Queen's University of Belfast, where I was Pro Vice Chancellor.

And then I was also living in the beautiful village of Restrever, just across the border.

And though I had lived, of course, in the Republic and I'd worked in both Trinity College and an RTE, both in radio and television.

Well, I was more thinking about the influence that you could have.

And where now do you... place your emphasis and your focus? Where is your sense of social justice leading you in this moment?

Well, funnily enough, it's working with Helena, privileged every so often, I mean, on a regular basis to get the missives from the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, which Helena heads up with all the things that she's doing stretched across this world that we're living in, which is unfortunately experiencing the gravitational pull of evil, of conflict, of The way the world has always been and always was right up to the end of the Second World War.

And I'm very conscious that we were born, Helen and I, in very similar circumstances in the aftermath of the Second World War.

We were the beneficiaries of free second level education.

Both our sets of parents would have left school early, my parents at 14 or 15.

Never had the chance of education because it took money.

They didn't have it.

we're going to

What insight did you gain, say, working north and south during the Troubles, whether it be as a barrister, as a journalist, or as Pro Vice-Chancellor of Queens, that formed your commitment to reconciliation?

I think my My interest in reconciliation goes back before I came to Queens.

I was born and reared not far from here in our town where 70% of the people in our town were unemployed.

It was a poor parish.

It was and became the place with the highest incidence of sectarian murders in Northern Ireland bar none.

It's still the place where if you go up that road that I was born and raised on, you still have that massive wall to keep one side of the community from encountering the other.

I was lucky that encountering the other wasn't a problem for me.

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