As Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak have repeatedly said the intelligence and security relationship between the United States and Israel at present is unprecedented. It has never been stronger.

While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.

Well I think there's a distinction between sexing-up the intelligence and sexing-up the presentation of the intelligence.

Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go they merely determine where you start.

With the world as it now presents itself there is something perverse and probably dysfunctional about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome the school-lottery migration the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

It's a different outlook and one that I understand. When you are a former member of the Warsaw Pact when you have lived behind the Berlin Wall when you have experienced the communist systems that existed in these countries for them the West represents hope.

I hope that at the end of the seven years people will say that I have been of some inspirational value to them at home in terms of inclusiveness and abroad I look forward to representing Ireland.

The 2012 London Olympic Games fostered a generation of hope. I witnessed women participating for the very first time representing every nation.