ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: She was the first female President of Ireland, she served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and now she is Honorary President of Oxfam. President Obama said she has shone a light on human suffering and illuminated a better future for our world. Recommendations don’t really come better than that and she is of course Mary Robinson and I am delighted to say she joins me now, a very good morning to you. Let’s start by looking at the overall human rights landscape, I know you have devoted a lifetime to that, do you feel the outlook at the moment is as bleak as ever when we look in particular at countries in the Middle East, in particular at Syria and what’s going on there?

MARY ROBINSON: The outlook has changed quite a lot, even in this short century because I was serving as UN High Commission for Human Rights in the year 2000, I welcomed the General Assembly’s Millennium Declaration because it talked about tackling poverty from a very human rights point of view and we got the Millennium Development Goals to tackle health and education etc. One year later we had the terrible attack of 9/11 and when the United States launched a kind of war on terrorism and put more emphasis on branding people as terrorists and trying to fight terrorists by not upholding their standards of human rights in relation to torture, in relation to Guantanamo Bay etc, other countries with less checks and balances of a democracy followed suit and we saw a real problem all over the world on human rights. I think we have seen more violence against civilians. It has happened before, we’ve had Kosovo, we’ve had Rwanda etc, but what’s happening in Syria I think is not unrelated to the war in Iraq, the whole divides that have opened up.

DM: But we are where we are as they always say, how do you approach the issue of Syria right now given the background you describe and it seems to come down from international organisation’s point of view of to intervene or not to intervene?

MR: I wouldn’t be in favour of military intervention, I do think we can do much more. We need a united Security Council and I think it’s time to take on the two countries that are blocking that, the Russian Federation and China, and have more popular criticism of those two countries. How can they be supporting a regime that is literally killing its people in very large numbers and driving them out of the country? I think that question has to be asked, Mr Putin has to be very much confronted with this more than he is being.

DM: Is your prescription though, looking back to your first answer there, when you look at the issue of terrorism and how in your analysis it has slightly skewed the debate I suppose, that the real answer to dealing long term with issues of terrorism is looking at things like poverty and beyond that, climate change?

MR: Well yes, mind you acts of terrorism are a total denial of human rights so given that people are not soft on terrorism, I believe perpetrators should be brought to justice but we should also uphold our standards and try to implement the commitments under the human rights covenants and conventions that governments voluntarily undertook. The link between human rights and climate is that climate change is undermining poverty and increasingly will be driving people from where they have lived because they won’t have food security, they won’t have water and they will have to move and that breeds the possibilities of conflict.

DM: But a lot of people, a lot of electorates in developed economies, in particular the rich developed economies in these difficult economic times which have been going on for so long, regard international development, the alleviation of poverty as something of a luxury and say, hold on, we have actually got to spend the money closer to home. It’s an argument that is going on here in the UK at the moment as I know you are well aware of, the Millennium goals remain in place in terms of …

MR: And I admire the fact that people are still focusing on the Millennium Goals and at keeping the aid budget at the level it is, I think it’s extremely important. It’s not the only answer, we need more emphasis on governance. I happen to serve on a foundation called the Mo Ibrahim Foundation which has an index of governance in the 54 countries, well the 52 countries of Africa because we have to wait until Sudan and South Sudan provide separate data for us but we can see in the other countries, the countries that are improving in governance terms broadly, economic governance, participation in human rights, tackling poverty, providing health and education and literally you can see the countries that are going up and the countries that are going down and we want academics and parliamentarians and civil society in African countries to say why is this country doing better, we want our country to be making the same improvements.

DM: Of course poverty is all relative as we all know but looking at your native country and having been there as President I suppose at the birth of the Celtic Tiger, what do you make of the difficulties it is going through now and the recipes it is prescribing to try to sort them out?

MR: Well I have to be a little bit constrained as a former president but in fact it was traumatic because it came quite suddenly, the turnabout from what seemed to be a successful Celtic Tiger but actually was a bit of hubris and greed and mistakes were made, particularly by developers and bankers and there is a sense that those who were most responsible haven’t really been held accountable as people would wish. Secondly, the pain is felt more by people who are in negative equity, who are in real problems in maintaining their business, small businesses but overall I think there is a resilience as well and one of the things I talked about a lot when I was running for President and seeking votes was a spirit of meitheal which is a Gaelic word which you may be familiar with, which means ‘linked to the other’ from our agricultural background and I’m seeing in towns around Ireland, and parishes and villages, that sense of neighbourliness, that sense of trying to pull together, that sense of community and small towns and communities are building on what’s there, trying to encourage tourists to come, developing their town or their parish in order to fight back basically.

DM: So in a way adversity can be a bit of a reality check. You must have seen it and I suspect held private personal concerns, I know you are not going to talk about policy while you were President, but that almost changed in the ethos of a country that had always cared and given a lot of money to charity and cared very, very deeply about developing countries, to actually getting very introspective and saying ‘there’s some cash, let’s make more’.

MR: And a bit selfish about that, yes. There were parts of the Celtic Tiger that I must say I didn’t find very appealing and I wish now of course that the Irish economy would come out of this more rapidly. We do have good export growth but that depends on other countries, notably this country and the rest of Europe and other countries that we export to, and our agricultural sector is doing better and I think has great prospects. It’s tough at the moment but I am pleased to have a foundation now on climate justice out of Ireland, because of our historical link with developing countries. As President of Ireland I was the first head of state to go to Somalia and offer to go to Rwanda and I think we are viewed as a country that knows what it’s like to have suffered terrible hunger in the past. Hunger is now back on the agenda of our world, not least because of high fuel prices, high food prices and the impact of climate and people I think need to know that that is affecting human beings, not just melting glacier and polar bears. I have nothing against polar bears but I think the real image now of climate change is an indigenous farmer who is having great difficulty because there are no seasons any more, there is drought and flooding and she’s hurting and she can’t provide food at the table. That’s what I’m seeing all over Africa and I think we need to be concerned about what we can do on the energy side because now we have off-grid solar energy to provide. I hope the term climate justice will become more known and that’s really what I’m passionate about now.

DM: Well great to talk to you, Mary Robinson thank you very much indeed for coming on the programme this morning.

MR: Thank you.