Professor John Sweeney:

With regard to leadership, I am reminded of a comment made by the late Desmond Tutu when he said he was a "prisoner of hope". We all have to be prisoners of hope in this problem. There is a lot of doom and gloom about it but we cannot give up hope. On leadership, since I retired from academia and left the ivory tower, I have worked more with NGOs and civil society groups such as An Taisce and with young people. I have found a much greater awareness and sensibility about the problem from those sectors of society. They see through the fog much more clearly than somebody who is beset and pestered by vested interest groups, and with various contradictory pressures coming on them. I am much more hopeful of finding in our young people the leadership qualities necessary. Professor Anderson referred to the 15-year-old Swedish girl. Perhaps we could add to that a 90-year-old broadcaster. We see, therefore, that a range of society is actually stepping up to the mark on this. Let us hope that they continue.