Professor Fintan Sheeran: Leadership begins as an undergraduate Nursing or Midwifery student.

Even today, as you look back on those examples you've given, where you said about being present with the patient, person-centeredness, which you really spoke about in your recent inaugural lecture, which we'll come back to in a few minutes.

You spoke about your tutor and your PhD.

With those pieces of you, as you look back, do you still think that promotion was because, or that opportunity to go to Sheffield was because

In recent years I've been involved a lot in EDI work, equality, diversity, inclusion work.

I was the chair of the Equality Committee in Trinity for a number of years.

I don't know how these things play out, but I do know that There is an ingrained, structured, systematized benefit and privilege that men get.

I don't know if it played out in that situation.

I hope it didn't, because if it did, then somebody else was deprivileged or not privileged.

I would hope that I just happened to be a person who had a degree in nursing, a tutor qualification in nursing, postgraduate diploma in education and a registration in that regard.

And I had a lot of experience through a PhD programme, a five year PhD programme, which gave me skills, which were probably a unique set of skills.

So I think I was the right person.

I have to always ask the question as a man, I have to ask the question, could there have been anything else there? And I'm hoping that there wasn't, and I don't think there was.

But it would be remiss of me, knowing what I know of the world, to not ask that question.

And to be honest, that opportunity opened other possibilities.

And then people are saying, when did you leave nursing? And of course, I always say I never left nursing.

I'm still a nurse and I always will be a nurse.

And I'm on a nursing career path, the education one, the research one, the leadership one.

But I never left nursing.

But you still feel some way that because you're not doing that patient care piece, that in some ways you're no longer really a nurse.

I've tried to address that through working in refugee situations up until last year was my most recent time, and doing care or humanising service with other human beings.

And humanising service isn't about me humanising others, it's about me becoming humanised, if that makes sense.

I'm absolutely hearing that human connection piece from what you've said.

And interestingly, around presence in April, when you did give your recent inaugural lecture at Maynooth University, you argued that presence and compassion are not soft additions to nursing, but the things technology and busyness might threaten.

Can you explain what you meant by that, Vinton?

I saw during my time in nursing and last September was, gosh, last September was 40 years since I started in the career path.