I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties. I spent quite a bit of time in choirs growing up, and in the world-touring music group, Anuna. It's a sound with very rich texture, voices singing together.

I was essentially raised on blues music. My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It's music that feels like home to me.

I spent quite a bit of time in choirs, growing up, and in the world-touring music group Anuna.

I didn't even have that many close LGBT friends or anything like that, but I suppose it was growing up and becoming aware of how you are in a cultural landscape that is blatantly homophobic... you turn around and say, 'Why did I grow up in a homophobic place? Why did I grow up in a misogynistic place?'

As the world has grown bigger for our country, the opportunities greater, the chances more glittering for our commerce and our people, too many of those who practice politics have taken a cramped and limited view of Europe and the rest of the world.

We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.

For me, there is no greater sunshine in politics or in life than to have a job, security for your family, a good school place where you know your child is going, and the sense that if I put in, there will be a decent, secure retirement at the end of it all.

Customs, traditions, laws should be flexible, within good reason, if that is what it takes to make our democracy work.