INTERVIEW:Patricia O'Brien was working in the Department of Foreign Affairs when she applied to be legal adviser to the UN Secretary General. Her life was turned upside down when she got the position - but her experience has served her well. 'Ireland was, and is, very active on issues of international law,' she tells SUSAN MCKAY.
SHE DOES NOT look like someone who has just arrived in Dublin off an overnight flight from New York and will be flying out to Geneva "at the crack of dawn" the following morning. Elegant, vivacious and razor-sharp, Patricia O'Brien is hard to faze. Even before considering the series of high-powered jobs she has done in the past, it is easy to see why she was chosen last year for one of the most sensitive positions in the world, as legal adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, and the UN's legal counsel.
"I was approached by the outgoing legal adviser who told me he thought I'd be a good candidate," she says. "I was surprised and delighted that he had noticed me and identified me in this way. I was legal adviser to the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time. I loved my job and I'd no intention of leaving, but I put in my CV."
A "very arduous but interesting" interview followed, focusing on the international pursuit of peace and justice. She felt, she says, surprisingly relaxed. "I'd covered most of the issues that came up in one way or another." There was a second interview, with Ban Ki Moon, and then, while she was on a skiiing holiday with her children in the south of France, he called her in person to say she had got the job. By the way, he told her, he wanted her to come to Italy to present a speech to senior UN colleagues, on "the responsibility to protect", two days after she was sworn into office, last August.
"My life turned upside down," she says. She was living in Dublin with her older daughter Antonia, who had just started studying medicine at UCD, her son, William, who had just finished boarding at Clongowes and had moved home prior to going to Trinity, and her youngest child, Louise, a day girl at Alexandra College. "It was quite a logistical exercise."
Antonia became mistress of the house, William got a room at Trinity Hall, and Louise became a boarder. "Mama" got an apartment in New York, and made a special arrangement with her phone company for cheap long-distance calls. "The children are all extremely happy," she says. "It's wonderful."
Wonderful is a word O'Brien uses a lot. Born in 1957 in Brunei, her own childhood was full of travel and change. Her father was a Dublin barrister who had worked for the Red Cross but had just joined Shell as a legal adviser. Her mother, who did not work outside of the home, was offered the option to return to Ireland, but stayed with her husband, moving every couple of years, to Nigeria, Cambodia and the Congo.
"It was a fabulous life," O'Brien says. "I was sent back to Ireland when I was seven. I boarded with the Dominicans in Wicklow, and got shipped out for holidays. They don't know this about me in the UN. We are dealing with the tribunal to try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia at the moment - the first trials have just begun and we're intensely working on that. I've spent time in Pnomh Pen in the past few weeks. I spent four years playing there. It was the most glorious place to live, before the war."
A debater at school, she studied law at Trinity, went to Kings Inns and was called to the bar in 1979, where she devilled for Nicolas Kerins, then a junior counsel, now a Supreme Court judge. "There were very few women at the bar at that time - I was one of about 15 out of 500," she says. "It was seen to be difficult for women to establish themselves. There was a slight lack of confidence in a young woman, but the wig and gown gave me a minimal air of gravity. Clients sometimes appeared shocked when they saw me, but they got over it.
"I never had a bad experience in relation to any gender issue," she insists. "We were welcomed. It was a friendly, collegiate environment. Of course, it helped that my father's friends were barristers and they gave me a lot of support." However, it was "sometimes difficult to keep a positive perspective," she says. "But I stuck with it."
She met and married a Tipperary man who was practising as a doctor in Canada, and she had her three children while living there. "I was very lucky to be in a position to focus on my children," she says, but adds that, "fortuitously I kept my hand in with the law." She qualified to practise as a barrister in Canada and taught at the University of British Columbia. "It was great to have all that under my belt," she says. "After I did my articles I was put onto heavy extradition cases. It was a wonderful opportunity."
"Sadly," she says, "my marriage didn't work out and I had to find a way to raise the children, fully supporting them on my own. I felt the best idea was to return to Ireland and that the wisest route to follow was to go for a position in the attorney general's office." As it happened, she arrived just as the AG's office came under a glaring spotlight over its role in failing to extradite the child-abusing priest, Brendan Smyth.
"It became very interesting very quickly," she says, but declines to be drawn on the affair that brought down a government.
"I just worked hard and got on with it. My children were very young and I was more focused on settling them than on the work, frankly. We lived with my mother and we had this quiet, stable life." (Her father had died at the age of 52.) Then she was asked if she would become legal counsellor to the Irish permanent delegation to the EU, in Brussels. "Movement must be in the blood," she says. "The children were doing well. I thought it would be a great opportunity for them to immerse themselves in another EU country."
In Brussels, she enrolled the children not at the international school favoured by many EU ex-pats, but at the local school. "They absorbed the language and were up and running in no time."
It was a good time to be in Brussels, she says, and working on the Amsterdam treaty "required a lot of thinking". As well as working as the attorney general's person in Europe, she was seconded to the Department of Foreign Affairs. "An interesting dynamic," she says. Life was interesting in other ways, too. She met her partner, Conor Quigley, in the city. A barrister from Belfast, he had chambers in London and Brussels.
After four years, she got promoted back to Dublin, to head the attorney general's office. "We worked mostly on issues to do with refugees and EU law," she says. "I was the adviser on the Nice treaty and I worked closely with the Taoiseach's office." Then the job as adviser to the Department of Foreign Affairs came up. "This time, it was no longer a case of necessity dictating my choices - I was really keen. I find it fascinating working in an international environment," she says.
"From the minute I went into the department, I had fantastic colleagues, a most remarkable team. There really was extraordinary talent there. The issues were fascinating - Ireland was, and is, very active on issues of international law." She mentions advising on the Israeli "wall" ("we had doubts about its legality"), the law of the sea, Anglo-Irish issues, the question of the use of Shannon in US rendition cases. Her work involved a lot of travel, and meetings with UN as well as EU colleagues. "That's where I built up a profile without really realising I was doing it."
She says at one point that she hopes she isn't coming across "all aren't-I-marvellous?" But in fact she is remarkably modest. She is the first woman ever to hold her current position, something which makes her feel "honoured and proud". "I've always seen my career like that. It's an example, it enriches the potential for other women to realise their dreams, and encourages them to try. Doing a good job is part of that."
Ban Ki Moon has proved himself strongly committed to reaching a 50/50 balance of women and men in the UN. "I find him remarkable. His human values are so admirable and he has extraordinary discipline and commitment," says O'Brien. "He says the Koreans have a lot in common with the Irish. They are both into the family, and they are small countries that punch quite big in their commitment to the international sphere."
She manages a staff of 160. "That is quite a task, people from different cultures and backgrounds - you have to be physically at the helm," she says.
She only travels when it is necessary, but as well as Cambodia, has been to Congo, Lebanon, Rwanda and Tanzania, where the UN's war crimes tribunal, set up after the genocide in 1994, is about to conclude. Her most difficult issues have involved international criminal courts. She also travelled to Kenya to urge the government there to hand over Rwandan fugitives, and stated publicly that the authors of the genocide would not escape justice and would be pursued by the UN.
On her advice, the UN rejected an appeal from Burmese politicians democratically elected in 1990. They said they should replace the military junta's representatives at the UN. O'Brien found that this would not comply with the legal rules of procedure.
This visit to Dublin is fleeting, but it will be a big family occasion. After the interview, she's going to "whizz off home", she says. Her partner has flown in from London, and is taking her and the children, and her mother, who is now in a nursing home, out to dinner. "We catch our moments," she says.