If Adi Roche had followed her early instincts, her life might have followed a markedly different path. The tireless campaigner for a variety of causes and now prospective presidential candidate once revealed that at school she had been very religious - and toyed with the idea of becoming a nun.
Instead of that her early adult life took a more conventional route; Ms Roche took a job in Aer Lingus before resigning in the early 1980s to become full-time secretary of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The youngest of a family of four from Clonmel in Co Tipperary, where her parents still live, she had lobbied against the nuclear industry "since the days of Carnsore" and at one time, with her husband, Mr Sean Dunne, was also involved with the environmental body, Earthwatch.
But it is as founder director of the Cork-based Chernobyl Children's Project that she has really caught the public's - and now the politicians' - imagination.
The organisation was set up following a 1991 fax appeal from doctors in Belarus pleading for help for children afflicted by a range of health problems as a result of the Chernobyl disaster five years earlier.
Ms Roche remains vice-president of Irish CND, but since that appeal she has virtually dedicated her life to the cause of the children of Chernobyl.
By the start of this year, the project she founded had delivered over £6 million worth of medical aid direct to hospitals and orphanages in Belarus and western Russia. Thousands of children, including another 1,500 this summer, have also been airlifted to Ireland, Britain and the United States to enjoy recuperative summer holidays with host families from the project's 65 outreach groups.
Ms Roche approaches her missions with a single-mindedness that can defeat the most obstinate of bureaucratic opponents. When the largest aid convoy ever assembled in the Republic arrived in Belarus in April, she and her team found themselves held up by so much red tape that other agencies had left in exasperation. The convoy of 70 trucks was delayed for several weeks.
But many phone calls later to Dublin, London and Minsk, and the bureaucrats had been beaten. The convoy got through.
An insight into how she views those who fail to help the cause she promotes with such determination was given in an interview last year when she talked about her daily six-mile walk at 7 a.m. "Sometimes when I'm really angry with someone who has broken a promise to us, I write their name on the sole of each shoe before I start, then literally walk out those negative feelings."
Whether she'll soon be walking out those negative feelings in the environs of Aras an Uachtarain, time will tell.
