When Denis Halliday packs his bags in Baghdad and quits his position as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq next September, two key UN member-states will be glad to see him gone. UN sources have confirmed that both the US and Britain requested his removal earlier this year.

Mr Halliday (57), who announced that he was standing down earlier this week, declines to comment on this. However, it is no secret that the unassuming Irishman aroused western ire over his criticism of the effect of sanctions on Iraq. When the slow strangulation of a country is in direct conflict with the protection of human rights outlined in the organisation's charter, there is something seriously rotten in the body politic of the United Nations.

Speaking in Galway before catching a flight back to New York this week, Mr Halliday admits he cannot live with this moral conflict any more. He also misses his 15-year-old daughter in New York. He was certainly not driven from the job. Before taking the post a year ago, he was told if both the UN Security Council and the Iraqi government were unhappy with his work, he was definitely doing something right.

Born in Dublin to Quaker parents, Denis Halliday was the most senior Irish person in the UN until the appointment of Mary Robinson as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights last year. Before she took the job, he briefed her on it. It has to be one of the most difficult postings, he says. "No government wants to be told what to do." But "she's tough," he says. "And doing very well."

He extends the same praise to the many Irish peacekeepers serving with the military, and to compatriots working with non-governmental organisations. Wherever he travels - most recently to the Kuwait border - he comes across the accents.

"Ireland has a very high reputation overseas. It is a very powerful thing. I don't think people at home quite appreciate that."

His own reputation spans 34 years with the UN, preceded by work as a Quaker missionary in Kenya in the early 1960s, and with the UN Development Programme - where he was latterly head of human resources, a post also held by the current UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan.

His first UN appointment was in Iran. Finishing in Iraq, a very different culture with dominant Sunni rather than Shia Muslims, is "coming full circle". He is more conscious than ever of the gulf in understanding. "So much of our culture owes its origins to Mesopotamia."

The lack of comprehension is reflected in the imposition of sanctions on Iraq - "a very proud people, who have now been humiliated". The potential crisis drummed up in the US earlier this year - when President Clinton was embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky affair - is an example of this.

Again, he cannot comment. But when the UN inspectors demanded access to presidential palaces, this was regarded as an affront to national pride - only defused when the UN Secretary-General met President Saddam.

Mr Halliday's main job has been to implement the food-for-oil programme, under which 30 per cent of the proceeds of sales of oil by Iraq is reserved for compensation owed for the Kuwait invasion.

Due to the halving in the price of oil over the last 12 months, very little is left to pay for food and medicines required to feed 23 million people.

What's worse, due to the breakdown in the country's infrastructure, including electricity supplies, the capacity to produce oil has been severely diminished. Electrical power is operating at less than 40 per cent of normal capacity. The UN Security Council agreed in principle to provide spare parts required for production and pumping of oil, but this has not happened.

Although Mr Halliday secured agreement on the doubling of the amount of oil that Iraq could sell, the country is barely surviving, and child mortality, malnutrition and deprivation are at crisis levels.

"Dreadful figures are produced by the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. There has to be a more positive way. After the second World War, the Marshall Plan responded to needs. This sort of system of sanctions is counterproductive, and exacts too high a price."

HE does not have any easy answers. "Yes, the UN would want to retain some capacity in relation to weapons inspection, and reserve a monitoring role. But to destroy an economy, cause widespread hardship to those most vulnerable sections of the population, and prompt the huge flight of professional Iraqi people abroad, is not the solution. There has to be some sort of reward system which adjusts national policy to a standard acceptable to UN member-states."

Education is in complete chaos, he says, due to a shortage of materials and lack of heating systems. Many teachers have given up in despair, and absenteeism among pupils is running at 30 per cent.

No one incident influenced his decision to leave, he says. "I'm not mushy and emotional, I am meant to be a professional civil servant administering to a country".

However, he was particularly affected by involvement with four children in a leukaemia ward of Saddam Hussein City Hospital. As he told Lara Marlowe earlier this year, he obtained medicines for them in Jordan and Turkey. By the time he returned to visit them with presents, two of them had died.

He is optimistic, for all that. "I think the great majority of member-states are ready to see sanctions lifted." He always wanted to leave while he was "still wanted", and is not critical of UN headquarters as such.

"In any large organisation, there is always a tension between headquarters and those in the field, and this is often blown out of proportion by those who don't understand. Many of those people in New York are under terrible pressure."

It is the fact that "one has to execute decisions one might not agree with", and bow to the wishes of member-states - some of whom are as "guilty" as the "crazy regimes" they try to confront - that makes life so difficult.

The US, for instance, has still not signed the convention on the protection of children. He does not intend to hang up his boots, but will spend the next couple of years in New York, and harbours dreams of studying anthropology and archaeology at NUI Galway.

He will remain available for short missions, at the request of the UN Secretary-General, whom he has known for 20 years.

And after 34 years, he says, he would "like to do some small thing for Ireland". One small gesture. He is not specific. Perhaps because he feels he has already said enough.