Adi Roche finds it very difficult to say why people should vote for her, rather than her four rivals, to be President of Ireland. "It's very hard to say positive things about yourself, but I'm going to try to say them anyway." She thinks she could make people proud of the image of Ireland that she could project at home and abroad. She believes she has a track record of being "a fairly decent human being and showing that I actually have the calibre that I can get things done. I have energy. I have enthusiasm. And I think that people like the honesty that is associated with breaking the silence and telling the truth."
The Labour-nominated candidate, who has stepped aside as head of the Children of Chernobyl Project and vice-president of CND, refreshingly admits she won't refuse to "budge on something" because it's easier to give a more fudgy answer, and maybe not to say where you stand on an issue directly because it may lose you votes. "I want people to see me as I am," she states. "I will put my opinions. I will make my concrete proposals. People can reject or accept them. They have that democratic right, but I also think they have the right to know."
Everything that she is known to stand for, apart from Chernobyl, seems to be against Government policy, even Dick Spring's foreign policy in the last government. Would that assumption be wrong?
Her opinions are very well recorded, she says, particularly in relation to the defence changes within Europe, about which she is deeply concerned. "If there's a movement towards dependency on nuclear weapons or military alliance arrangements, I would have massive problems with that. I always have."
Ms Roche will read the Amsterdam Treaty like every other citizen to see what it says. And, based on that, she says, she will make her decision. One of the areas she will have "an extra eagle eye on" will be the defence issue. She had no problem in general when she was involved in the anti-Maastricht campaign. It was just the specifics of defence and security. She has a vision of Europe which is much the same as everybody else's "except on the defence issue".
Asked if she had difficulties with Ireland's decisions to join the Partnership for Peace and to take observer status at the Western European Union, Ms Roche responds: "I do, I do. I definitely do. Without a doubt there's no way I'd ever budge on that or give you an indirect answer. I think that's a long and slippery sliding road to further militarisation and nuclearisation. At the end of the century, it's part of the old Cold War thinking, and I hope we leave that behind and progress in a different way".
She wants to be crystal-clear, however, on this one. "I recognise that I'm giving you my own opinions, which are well known over the last 20 years, on these issues. They are the opinions of Adi Roche, citizen of Ireland. But Adi Roche, President of Ireland, does not have the right to voice, to shape, make or influence in any way what the decision of the people will be. When people are coming to a referendum, they won't need to be asking any questions and I won't need to have to be responding. I fully recognise that I will be bound by the oath," she states.
Ms Roche is on special leave from the board of directors of the Chernobyl Project, and has stepped down from her position in CND, since the Sunday her nomination by Labour, Democratic Left and the Green Party became public.
Turning to the question of Northern Ireland, Ms Roche says that she doesn't see herself as a nationalist. Nor would she particularly wish to see a united Ireland. "I never got caught up in that whole sort of thing that it has to be either way. I would always think that it doesn't have to be all black and white. There are always other colours. For me, it comes down to what is hammered out around the table in the current negotiations."
With her competitor, Prof Mary McAleese, having such a high profile on the North, Ms Roche insists she wouldn't want to have any group that was threatened by her Presidency. "Now this might seem like innocent imagery, but sometimes there is nothing wrong with innocence either. It's the idea of being there as the embodiment of the white in the flag, embracing the gifts, values and talents of both communities, both green and orange."
She would never feel like she has the right, as a Southern Irish person, to say what it should be for people in Northern Ireland, because that only adds to the divide, particularly for the unionist community. They feel threatened enough by what they perceive to be coming from people in the South.
"Again I think it's coming up as the neutral party and it's that listening role, the role of not being identified as either a nationalist or a unionist. It's waiting to see what evolves, but I don't think it should be prejudged to be part of Britain or that it has to be a united Ireland. There can be other scenarios. That's what I hope would come of the talks."
Ms Roche is equally forthcoming, when asked, on other domestic issues. She voted, but didn't actively campaign, for divorce. "I am actually opposed to abortion," she states, "but I recognise that people have to make difficult decisions, and I would never see myself in judgement of what another human being has to do in relation to their own lives.
"The kind of work I've done for 20 years has been about life when children are born. I would be opposed to abortion for myself, but people have to make decisions for themselves, which are their decisions.".
Turning to more personal matters, she is most animated about her Chernobyl project. Did she ever consider adopting a Chernobyl child? "Did I what?" she responds. "God, several times, several times, I could even think of individual children." The closest she got, she says, was when her sister, Helen Barret from Baldoyle, went to adopt the little boy with the big tumour.
She would have gone to adopt him, she states, with words spilling out at a hundred a minute, "but I always felt that, at the end of the day, if I was to do that properly I would have to be with the child all the time and then it would be very hard to do the work which really necessitates being on call 24 hours a day, being on call seven days a week and being able to head off in convoys or to negotiate".
Her husband, Sean Dunne, would give up his teaching post in the fee-paying Christian Brothers College in Cork if she were elected President. But it posed a major question for them. "Sean had questions on that when we were negotiating with the boyos on the day they came down. That famous day that I was definitely not going to go for this," she explains. He was very reassured when he found out he wouldn't be hidden in the back room.
Ms Roche has always been very conscious of the importance of using her vote and, usually, casts it for the Greens or left-wing parties. "I have never been put into any particular party box. The fact that I have been asked to be a candidate by every party is a reflection of people not knowing. Is she Fianna Fail? Is she a PD? And the Labour Party were the last to come to me at the end of it all, which was a gas".
She is standing for the Presidency because she is not interested in party politics. "I just never wanted to be pigeon-holed, to get engaged in a party structure," she says. She considered accepting nominations from two Taoisigh to the Seanad - Mr Reynolds and Mr Bruton - but the importance of her independence won out. "If I wasn't 1,000 per cent sure that I'd have the independence, I wasn't going to go for it, and that's why I didn't. That's why the office of the Presidency attracts me."
What does she think of Mr Haughey now? "Oh Lord, I think I must be one of the last great innocents, but I was absolutely shocked. I know for years things have been said about Charlie Haughey. I didn't want to believe them, I suppose," says Ms Roche.
What shocked her most, she adds, is that he got away with it for so long. She's also horrified that so many people knew and remained silent in their own vested interest.
It is her turn now, for the constitutional questions, which she chose to leave to the end. She is no clone, she says, of Mary Robinson, though it was inevitable that such comparisons would be made with any woman candidate in this election. She shares a huge quest for human rights and justice with Mrs Robinson, but otherwise they have little in common. Ms Roche comes from a lower middle-class background. She didn't go to third-level college.
"The job that I'm not applying for was inspection and ownership of who I am and what I have been. Nothing has been altered for me, not even my hair, for this campaign. Like nothing. I remember once sitting down with Fergus Finlay and saying `well, Fergus, you want me to be something different (like I had this incredible energy), and fit me into some sort of packaged thing'. A look of horror came across his face and he said: `No, that's the one thing we don't want you to be. Be like yourself.' "
Mary Robinson created an amazing Presidency, she continues, and she wouldn't see any reason why that should be changed in any way, just built on and extended. Her proposals are to look at the charter of the International Red Cross, the global summit and the children's commission for 1999.
Ms Roche has already decided that Helen Faughnan, this amazing woman who's lived with them for the last year-and-a-half in Cork, will be her Bride Rosney. She's on special leave to the Chernobyl Children's Project from the Department of Social Welfare until the end of this month. A former private secretary to several Ministers, including Charlie McCreevy, Brendan Daly and Michael Woods, Ms Roche describes her as "my confidante, my closest friend, and she's the woman who is highly qualified for the job".
Could she envisage any circumstances where she, as President, would use her one absolute power to refuse a Taoiseach a dissolution of the Dail?
"I have thought long and hard about that," answers Ms Roche earnestly, "and basically I think that no, looking at the history of the Presidency 60 years on, the index year. Nobody has been called upon to use that. I think I'd generally go for the status quo"
She adds, as a rider, that she thinks she would choose discretion. "You can't bring in the Council of State for that. But that doesn't stop you from making your private, independent contacts while you're making that assessment. There isn't a 24-hour deadline that you have to make the decision within 24 hours to dissolve, yea or nay. So I would be pulling in the expertise, whether to be pulling in the Chief Justice or, for example, Mary Robinson, who would be a member of the Council of State, and I'd base it on that."
If the Government advised her not to proceed with the commission on children, would she accept their advice? "OK," she begins, "whatever it was I would accept their advice and then find another way. It could be a different version, a variation on a theme, and maybe not in the form that I'm proposing but in another form."
She thinks she probably would always accept the Council of State's advice on the referral of a Bill to the Supreme Court. She would have no reason to think that "I would go otherwise against this sort of expert body". She points out, however, that she would have the option to refer the Bill en bloc or by section to the court.
Ms Roche has given some consideration to her presidential nominees to the Council of State. She'd pick disability for representation. Somebody like Sister Stan, working with people who are marginalised within Irish society. She'd also pick the business and education sectors. She'd aim to be inclusive so that everybody would feel "that one person would represent me".
She loves the idea of the candle in the window. "What I would love to think is that there could be some form of ceremony of actually asking Mary Robinson for the same light to be given back to be relit. I use this old saying `it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness'. Because it was Mary Robinson's, there's no reason why we shouldn't go with that symbol again. I wouldn't see any reason for changing that."
She would welcome the opportunity to use the facility to address the nation or the Dail if the need arose, "but I wouldn't create a need unless there's something very specific".
She'd definitely love to travel as President. Northern Ireland would be very important, frequent contacts to build up a relationship there, not necessarily high-powered visits. She also stressed the importance of travelling to England, the US, the EU, parts of the former Soviet Union and that one obvious place, Belarus.
Asked for her views on the changes in the role of the President recommended by the Constitution Review Group, chaired by Dr T.K. Whitaker, Ms Roche says she would agree that if the people wanted to see the President with a bit more power, that should be reflected by a change in the Constitution to allow it to happen.
Adi Roche, in summary, would see herself as very different to the other candidates. She understates that she has been "at the butt end of some criticism". She is adamant that she will not respond in kind. She says that she has made a lady's agreement with herself in this campaign.
"I want to be able to come out of this six or seven weeks of campaigning able to dust myself down and pick up the pieces and move in whatever direction, be it this way or that way. That I would be able to say that was fair, it was dignified, it was honourable."
She asserts that she is seriously an independent candidate. She is unique, she adds, in that over 20 years she would have had to deal with whatever government was in power, negotiating with the Departments of Health, Foreign Affairs, Justice. She has got £8.5 million tucked under her belt and sent out in aid. She has brought 4,000 Chernobyl children to Ireland, dozens for treatment. She believes that she, more than any other candidate, has created employment through her charity work.