think again. and rejoin this remarkable adventure in democratic politics the dead hand of bureaucracy you know can sometimes you know take the gloss off dreams and but so to condemn these are so too can forgetting what this was all was about because europe is also about peace as well as prosperity and for ireland it has helped to secure both for us where you're passionate european a great angler fire or a great friend of of britain but isn't a small part of yours an irish woman who would appreciate that role reversal of. street having to do phone to phone in dublin to get issues raised because it's no life about her i find it really depressing because here's what really excited me it excited me that we ireland joined the european union voluntarily i used to joke it was the only union we joined voluntarily we didn't join the united kingdom

voluntarily but we sat around the european union table with our former imperial colonizing masters and we sat as friends we sat as partners as neighbors and over a period of time we took all the value of these of history and over two or three generations we dismantled them and were able to offer our children something really humanly very decent but it's a hundred years since women in the united kingdom obtain the paschal for choice which of course was centralized with were violent. telling partial freedom one hundred years ago what aspects of of this breaks that process do you see years as a threat to the rights and title moments for equality of the women of gays and over . that's a really interesting perspective out because i'm not sure that i've heard a lot of people raising that when we go. back to it and your description of women

getting the vote as partial is very important it is important to remember that when it was given to women it was only given to women over thirty and those who have property and that is very telling that really over this past century there's been still a huge amount of work to be done in terms of liberating women from all the bricking mechanisms all the proper suppositions and presumptions about women's abilities that held them back from full participation in every aspect of life whether it was access to education the professions politics church whatever and we're still dismantling that architecture of massage that underpinned their exclusion from all of those so i think it's a very important question you're is i look at what the european union helped us to achieve for women equal pay equal you know equal right to employment no i'm not saying that we've achieved any or all of those things but they've given us again the infrastructure the architectural structure to be able to navigate to those

destinations and we're on our way to those destinations and europe. has structure that assists women in my view and we have to remember that must much of what we take for granted today whether it's in terms of equal opportunities whether it's in terms of equal pay but the arguments that we make and back of that are supported by european legislation most of my translated into national legislation that we have structure we don't just have to rely on advocacy we have structure and it is that structure which will create the highways to the future that women will course down the other big issue is immigration of course i know that if you look back at the history of irish immigration irish immigration was a great to britain was a huge boon particularly to irish women who could not get work at home take a look at ireland in a relatively short period of time we who were always an ember griffin nation

suddenly became a nation of inward migration today almost seventeen percent of our population is non native of irish and they are highly educated on average they're better educated than us and that's saying something because they are very well educated they have integrated very well into our community and we in fairness have made a lot of efforts to make sure that they did why because our people knew what it was like to be told no irish need apply and we know what it was like to have nothing except just your two hands the one length to work on the horde to work in the dirty job to work for your children so that they would get the education they would become the doctors the dentist the nurses the accountants the politicians the corporate sector and a generation or two generations which is exactly what the irish did we know the story of immigration ends if you give people

a chance because we were those people. her . point. of. the moment we've had a period of fake the flame. engineer by all the central banks and the they don't have the control that they think that they have and once you start to see this being picked up in markets like the gold market and others you know you've got to start to see feed on itself in a big way. fifty years ago breaking and we've been to a concert going on as a sleeping pill and dusty says we don't leave because. the scientific sweat terrible but not on. induction untroubled by the world here nor the

war. across europe victims are starting legal battles demanding at least some compensation. in two ways first will the physical damage itself as well that the constant mind that the people who actually perpetrated this crime has never been able to justice and there's been a couple of. ukraine isn't it pre-collapse the situation crisis there moment or do you bring new all of you ukraine agreement was all region closure not. exactly because of some countries for historical reasons something countries are obsessed about the role of russian federation i can understand by can of the glee.

welcome back to dublin i'm speaking to many marco he's for fourteen years alone or president of ireland love it's been said that i was chef a moment progress of transformation in island over the last generation but looking through a political career how would you assess the social try. before the social transformation of ireland i think really is rooted in the massive changes that happened in access to education from the one nine hundred sixty s. onwards with the opening up of second level education free and then the massive occasion of university education as you know and has one of the highest rates of third level education in it's working among us working people going to give you a simple example my mom and dad my dad god rest of my mother. were smart but they belonged to a generation that had no chance of education my father became a barman my mother came out her dresser they would have loved it had the chance to

stay on school after fourteen but it just didn't happen when i got into university i was the orders of nine children the first of my family were to go to college and my parents were so one through all that they took the whole nine of us including the baby who was my mother's youngest child who was then only a matter of a few months old they took us to launch we'd never been to launch before and. i had just got my a level results so i knew i was getting and queen's to do law. school. what happened was the girl who were serving us came along with the menu and i can still remember my father giving it to me for me to order for all of us i remember the pathos of that that some home my father felt increasingly there was a gap between him and his daughter who was nice to become an educated person because my parents had wonder in their eyes at the idea of being in the company of

educated people they up until then they were really only educated people they were under the thumb of really were the local clerics. and so. for them the idea that their daughter was going into that world was an extraordinary phenomenon now i tick that the image of that. and that for me was the watershed in ireland because everybody around us was the first generation to university everybody around us suddenly had kids who were becoming whatever their parents had never had a hope of being we know could become and did become the culture that we came from the religion that we came from the underpinning value systems that we came from we know had the tools for interrogating that to ensure that those things were consonant with the other parallel track we were living with which was the european convention on human rights the universal declaration of human rights the

realisation that for example that we as women or catholics or blacks or whatever that we were the equal of anybody and everybody and everybody was intitled to respect if we wanted respect we had to give it that systems that had grown up around disrespect around elites the hold for example of the churches in ireland. diminished greatly and there's an irony in that because i and most of the people around me who have the benefit of education got that education thanks to the churches we belong to in my case it was the dominican nuns in the mercy non-zero who who give me access to the education that got to me or to where i am now to kind of an irony to me that that's a i'm church that give me my education simply cannot cope with educated women it seems but at least the hierarchy of the church can't cope with educated women they are terrified of them and but that's

a good thing too because that proves the problem of power. of interrogation that we were given the powers of analysis that ensure that we're always seeking to refresh and that the destiny we see is a destiny of equals and the future of our lives where women the future of. strong i think the future of our land is really very very strong when i think of what we coped with during the years when the celtic tiger disappeared and the huge problems that that produced for everybody particularly people left with huge debts and people who lost their jobs and having come from a time when it looked as if we had actually cracked forever the problems of migration and poverty and. employment underemployment and unemployment for one golden moment when the celtic tiger was in its you know if and

when it was at a very advanced stage we felt the power of what could be when everything was working well for us then that all fell away it was a diabolical lesson and the hardship the people injured but then they endured it you know with something approaching real economic real stores as a extraordinary store says i'm and we've now come through it still with casualties but. but we're through the worst of it in my view and in the doing of that i think the social solidarity that we have is really it's an exemplary thing i'm very fortunate my three children who've all been away have all lived away at some time or been away at some time all tell me that by comparison with all the places in the world they have either lived or have studied that they would live nowhere else but the great city of dublin maybe my clues thank you so much for just one thing. for

example sure you get the quick pushes the the copper kindness as you know the whisky goes in in the quick which the scotch best but. this was where i learned this all over saluting of course for our thank you mike my late father would have adored this though i have to say on his deathbed when we asked him what advice he wanted to give the ninth children gathered round his bed willing for him to die he said jemison is your only man. for good so what a pleasure. emotive discuss the interview with mary michael hughes and they did the three interviews and this series i'm joined by professor john tong professor of british and irish politics at the university of liverpool john welcome to the valley so i'm unsure so looking at the million mark lives interview which in some senses personifies the peace process

a teenager growing up in belfast when the trouble started role is to become president of ireland at a time basically of the peace process been established and of gloomy economic and social progress how rate issue to be worried about the brics at threat to all of that progress where you sense from the interview with mary mcaleese her frustration at the way that brags it threatens to derail a very carefully constructed peace process mary mcaleese was part of that peace process generation having lived through a conflict she came to appreciate greatly as did her children the benefits of relative peace in northern ireland and she seems monumentally frustrated at how briggs it threatens to derail that she seemed baffled by the fact that anyone could receive a carefully constructed process by an act of economic self harm from from a british point of view and from our point of view as she points out what about the good friday agreement that's the question has not been answered the good friday agreement is an international treaty it's read just that the united nations it

can't simply be changed that the the stroke of a pen and strum two of that agreement the all island dimension you would simply have to rewrite it to accommodate the united kingdom leaving the european union as mary mcaleese said the good friday agreement was predicated upon the u.k. and ireland being part of that european union the implications of brigs it are very profound for both nations and thinking let's have a look at the other two interviews just snatches from them and see what they have to heron and middling donald had to say. i mean this threesome me or david davis even than you know on either side of the complacent because of speeding up p.t. that of composite of peace and i let me try hard in the breakfast at the base at to get the irish message over. i went to some.