TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen showed his more sensitive side to an audience of several hundred students at a Chinese university yesterday.
In response to questions from the floor, Cowen revealed that John McGahern was his favourite writer, that he was deeply conscious of the brevity of life, and that his strongly held republican outlook strictly excluded any spilling of human blood.
Listeners generally agreed it had been a highly revealing "mass interview" and much more interesting than the occasionally edgy encounters between the Taoiseach and representatives of the news media.
The young idealists at China Foreign Affairs University asked Cowen about his youthful dreams, his "motto" (he said he hasn't got one), and his taste in reading.
The Taoiseach answered the somewhat left-field queries in his usual midlands style.
Asked to name his favourite Irish writer, Cowen said it was McGahern because, "he is able, through local settings and local storylines, to provide some universal themes with universal insights".
Recalling that he was "a man I had the pleasure to meet shortly before he died", the Taoiseach said McGahern was "a very good ambassador for this country".
Predicting that McGahern would "grow in renown in the years ahead", Cowen said his work "captures for me a world that's gone in Ireland, a world that no longer exists".
His portraits of a vanished agrarian world gave "a great insight into character" provided by "a great storyteller - John McGahern - I recommend him".
Asked what his "motto of life" and what was "your dream in your young age", the Taoiseach said he didn't have a favourite motto.
"It's important to live the day. You don't know how long you are going to have the gift of life in this world, so you'd better live it to the fullest and live it to the best of your ability".
He told the young questioner his basic approach to life was that you cannot seek everything for yourself because "you have to be part of a wider society, a wider unit, whether it's family or community or whatever it is".
He observed: "We're getting very philosophical here."
In political terms, he continued: "The dream has to be to live in a harmonious society where everyone's equality of opportunity is respected, where everyone lives to the best of their ability, their potential is reached."
Most important of all was to "inculcate a sense of citizenship in our people, that we don't, in the modern world, become simply consumers, complete individualists, that we are citizens who have rights and obligations to each other".
Asked about the situation in Northern Ireland and his views on the reunification of the island, Cowen said: "We have devised a new political framework in which we pursue our objectives. Our objective of national unity remains. It's a noble objective.
"I would regard myself as a constitutional republican. I believe the unity of Ireland would be good for all our people but I cannot and would not seek to achieve that by spilling one drop of blood through violence.
"It can only come through consent with those who think differently - who come from a different position - who are just as Irish as I am but who have a different historical background."
Irish unity would be defined in terms of unity of the people rather than in territorial terms.
"All that we insist upon is parity of esteem, mutual respect, equality for both traditions," he said.
What he called the "genius" of the agreement negotiated on Good Friday in 1998 was that, "You can be British or Irish, in fact, after unity, you can retain your sense of Britishness in a new Irish construct that would be a united construct."
Earlier, in an address entitled "Ireland/China Relations: Looking Forward", Cowen noted that the China Foreign Affairs University had been established at the suggestion of former premier Zhou Enlai and he personally agreed strongly with the latter's declaration:
"Do not divide countries into big and small.
"Treat all countries just the same."
The Taoiseach was introduced by the president of the university, Zhao Jinjun, a former ambassador to France, who expressed admiration for Ireland as "a country of wonder".