You have written that the birth of your granddaughter prompted you to write the book Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future. But at what point in your life did you realise that something wasn’t quite right?

I often say, quite humbly in a way, that when I served as President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, I never made any speech on climate. I may have talked about the environment a bit but not climate. Then I became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights but I didn’t make the connection between climate change and human rights. It was siloed and scientific. I formed the NGO Realizing Rights — a kind of pun. We were working in African countries on economic and social rights. I was then made aware of human-induced climate change and read up the science and realised that this was the biggest human rights issue.