Yesterday's handover of power in Iraq highlights the key role of the UN. Its most senior Irish official talks to Deaglán de Bréadún

Rosemary McCreery took up her new post at a difficult time. A month earlier, in August last year, terrorists had parked a truck packed with explosives outside the UN's headquarters in Baghdad. The blast killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the organisation's special representative in Iraq, and numerous others.

As well as the immediate tragedy there was the disturbing implication that UN staff were being targeted. "It was not somebody taking a potshot and happening to hit a peacekeeper. This was a very different thing," says the Irishwoman, who, as the organisation's assistant secretary general for human-resources management, is partly responsible for the well-being of UN employees.

It is an even more demanding responsibility now the US has transferred sovereignty to Iraq's interim government, two days ahead of schedule. The UN, which is involved in preparing the country for elections, probably in January, still treads warily. It is one of many areas that preoccupy McCreery, whose office is responsible for "selection, promotion, management, entitlements and everything else for all the staff who are administered through the UN secretariat, and that's currently about 18,000 people".

She is also at the forefront of a drive to eliminate sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel, mostly peacekeepers, in different parts of the world; she recently presented a report on the issue to a UN committee on behalf of Kofi Annan, the organisation's secretary general. Pointing out that it was only a first step in ensuring compliance with UN principles and standards, she singled out sexual abuse by UN contingents in Kosovo and in the Bunia region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"Peacekeeping missions are an important part of our work," she says. "Although the office of human-resources management doesn't administer the actual military contingents directly, we do oversee the human-resources-management aspects of the whole peacekeeping operation."

McCreery, whose career has spanned several continents, has no doubt that being Irish is a significant advantage in her work. "Definitely," she says, sitting in her office at United Nations headquarters, on the East River in New York. "You are carrying a lot less baggage than many other European countries." Her nationality has always helped open doors or ensure a welcome. "Particularly in Africa, everywhere you go you meet people who have been educated by the nuns or the \ Brothers," she says.

"Almost anywhere you go you meet people who have had some sort of contact with the Irish." There is also a political dimension, from Ireland's traditional foreign policy. "Neutrality has a lot of advantages when it is seen as a benign neutrality, which I think ours has been."

As her name implies, McCreery, who started as a third secretary at the Department of Foreign Affairs in the mid-1970s, has roots in Ulster. Her grandfather was from Donegal, but the family was based mainly in Dublin. As a result there was little argument about going to Trinity College after school, even though her father, himself a Trinity graduate, had settled in England, where he practised as a barrister after serving in the second World War with the Royal Air Force.

After reading French and Italian she decided to make a career in public service. "I did the civil-service exam and worked in the Department of Local Government [now the Department of the Environment\] for a year, and then I did the third-secretary exam and went into Foreign Affairs. I was in Foreign Affairs for about two years or so \. I was a year in the trade section, and then I was a year in Anglo-Irish, which was not so interesting, because at third-secretary level it was pretty low-level work.

"Then I looked around at my prospects, which didn't look too bright at that stage in Foreign Affairs. There was a period there in the 1970s where very large numbers of people came in, and there was a big number of us at the third-secretary level. I thought, well, I am going to be middle aged before I even get abroad or to first-secretary level. So I decided I would do something different for a bit, and I applied through APSO" - the Agency for Personal Service Overseas, incorporated into Development Cooperation Ireland - "to the UN volunteer programme, and that was how I ended up working for the UN in January 1979, in Togo.

"I applied thinking, well, you know, UN volunteer, I will be making the tea in some office somewhere. But I ended up in fact opening the Unicef office in Togo as a volunteer. It was the frontier days with Unicef. Obviously, it was a tiny little Unicef programme, but nevertheless I was it, basically.

"That was quite a challenge, because the nearest person I could ask for advice was in the Ivory Coast, which was quite a long way away. In those days, of course, you didn't have international telephone services that worked, you didn't have e-mail, fax, anything: you were dependent on telex."

It was a case of sink or swim, and the young Irishwoman not only survived but thrived in the job. She had volunteered for two years, at the end of which Unicef asked her to stay with the organisation. "By then I had got bitten by the bug, so I went off to Madagascar for four years. Again, it was a similar kind of situation, in the sense that I was basically the only person there and started the office from scratch, with my supervisor sitting in Nairobi and me sitting in Madagascar, which was even further away than they had been before."

After four "very good years" in Madagascar she moved on to Indonesia, which was a flagship programme for Unicef. "There was a big office with a lot of resources and money, by the standards of the 1980s, and I was doing a programme of integrated rural-urban development."

All of this service was in the tropics. But big events were happening elsewhere, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and there was a seismic shift in international relations, with consequences even for individuals such as McCreery.

Unicef called to ask if she would like to go to Romania. "So I said, why would I go to Romania? And they said - this was late 1990 - 'We've got some money to go and do something about the situation of children.'

"That was a very big change, because people like me joining the UN never expected to end up working in Europe. It was a completely closed book to us, Eastern Europe. Unicef had no offices in Eastern Europe since the end of the war. We had cleared out of Romania in 1953 or something and never gone back. I, in fact, was the first person appointed by Unicef to Eastern Europe in this new dawn. There were a lot of problems with international adoptions, and that was one of the first issues that I came across," says McCreery. (Romania, which in 2001 imposed a moratorium on foreigners adopting Romanian children, is now introducing legislation that will make the practice illegal.)

She moved to New York, to Unicef's head office, in September 1993, spending four years as deputy director of human resources. The organisation was going through big internal changes, as well as having to cope with a sudden explosion of emergencies in Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere.

"We were trying to get our human resources into shape, so that we could respond quickly to sudden surges in the need for people, and particularly trying to deal with a situation in which UN staff were suddenly in harm's way in a way that they had never been before." The issue of security for UN personnel is a constant worry, she says.

By way of a change, she followed with two years in charge of the Cambodia office of the UN high commissioner for human rights (at that time Mary Robinson). Then it was back to Unicef as the organisation's chief representative in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus before taking up her current position.

Ultimately, she hopes to settle in Ireland permanently and still returns every summer with her husband, who is an economic consultant.

Life with the UN has brought her into contact with people and situations that the ordinary Westerner will never experience.

"In some of the institutions for children in Romania I saw terrible things that you would never forget. I visited many prisons in Cambodia and will never forget the conditions people had to endure. At the same time I was very moved by the level of human dignity and grace in these extreme situations."

In addition to the security issues that she has spent the past year considering, another challenge of her job is to increase the number of women in the UN secretariat. "We are behind schedule in achieving the 50-50 target, although we still see that substantially fewer women than men apply for posts."

More broadly, she says: "We need to modernise the attitudes of the workforce. We need to rejuvenate it, because you see very clearly in the UN, and right across the board also in the specialised agencies, the average age is pushing up and pushing up, and we really don't have enough younger people coming in." She accepts that the UN is a very bureaucratic organisation. "There's still a lot needs to be done for everybody to lighten up and make it more nimble."

But while acknowledging its imperfections, she believes there is no substitute for the UN. "It's certain that the UN is going through a rocky situation at the moment, but then it's been through rocky situations before.

"There was a general feeling that people had that, after the end of the Cold War, somehow everything was going to work out fine, and it hasn't, and it isn't going to, and this present crisis with the UN is part of this.

"These things are cyclical, and I think we'll come out of it all right, but I think we are very fortunate to have the secretary general that we have. But it's going to be a rough and a difficult few years."

Deaglán de Bréadún is Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times