1. What’s the biggest misconception the public has about you?
That I wear Birkenstock sandals.

2. What are the biggest sacrifices you’ve had to make for a political career?
Having to control my exuberance.

3. What are the best and worst things about modern Ireland?
The best thing is the confidence and the can-do attitude. The worst is drunken brawls outside super-pubs at closing-time

4. Which politician’s private diary would you most like to read?
The early years of Václav Havel, the Czech Republic's poet president.

5. Who was the best Taoiseach we never had?
Constance Gore-Booth, better known as Countess Markievicz. She was appointed Minister for Labour in the first Dáil in1919. It is incredible that sixty years passed until the appointment of the second Irish female Minister with the appointment of Maire Geoghegan-Quinn in 1979.

6. What law would you pass tomorrow if you could?
The Planning and Development (Banning of Car and Building Alarms) Bill 2006

7. Is the media’s treatment of politicians too harsh / too lenient / about right?
A tad lenient.

8. Which interviewer do you most fear?
The gravelly voice of David Hanly in his Morning Ireland days when he would wake from his slumbers and say “Surely…?” and you knew you’d had it!

9. What’s your favourite term of abuse?
A withering glance generally does the trick, but if that fails ‘Stupid pumpkin head’. I’ve yet to use it in the Dáil, but my three year-old son advises me that I should.

10. Which celebrity would you most like to recruit for the Greens?
Dave McSavage the comedian. He probably wouldn’t suffer fools as gladly as the rest of us in public life, and that in itself would be entertaining.

11. What’s the funniest line you’ve ever heard in the Dáil?
'We were always dead against the war.' An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern TD speaking about Iraq on 28 December 2003

12. Which book would you make compulsory reading for your colleagues?
“The World’s Great Speeches” by Lamb and Copeland. It just might improve the quality of debate in the Oireachtas.

13. Do you ever get depressed by the public’s cynicism about politics?
Life’s too short for that. Their occasional apathy phases me, but I get over that.

14. How will history judge Mary McAleese?
A pillar of the establishment

15. What are the chances of a united Ireland by 2050?
Pretty high, the way things are going

16. What would you like your political epitaph to say?
“True to his own Spirit” (with thanks to Jim Morrison)