Past Secrets (57 page)

Thanks to Jenny Turner, boutique-owner extraordinaire in Enniskerry, for giving me such helpful advice for Always & Forever, not to mention showing me lovely clothes to admire when I drop down to the village for a litre of milk …

Thanks to Helen, Ming and Ethan Xu who are so brave and clever and a wonderful inspiration to me; thanks to Erin Estrich (beautiful inside and out) who will always have a special place in our hearts; thanks to Mary Walsh; to Jill Ross; to Carmel Ruttle; to darling Camilla Carruth; and thanks to one of the most spiritual people I’ve ever met and who’s an amazing mum, Jana. I can’t wait to see darling Lill.

Thanks to the lovely person in Dundrum Town Centre who found my Sony digital tape recorder and handed it in with all my notes in it.

A thanks that could go on forever to all the wonderful readers who make sense of what I do. Thanks for all your letters and emails: without you guys, none of it would work.

Thanks to my lovely friends in the bookselling world who are such fun to be with and love book gossip just as much as I do and who are the other vital part of what I do.

Finally, thank you to UNICEF Ireland for giving me the chance to become part of their team. I feel so privileged to be one of their ambassadors and for the chance to go into the field to meet wonderful people who, simply because of where they’re born, don’t have access to the same education, civil rights and medical help we do. My first trip to Mozambique was both humbling and lifechanging.

You can’t see the work UNICEF do in conjunction with local people and not be changed for life. Remember: these people want a hand up, not a hand out.

So thanks to the UNICEF team: Maura Quinn, Thora Mackey, Grace Kelly, Julianne Savage, Ann Marie Foran, everyone in the UNICEF

Ireland office and the incredibly hardworking committee who all work so hard to make a difference.

Thanks also to Stephen Rea for being a brilliant travelling companion.

For a television interview once, we worked out how many children would have developed HIV

in the time the interview took. Julianne did the maths for this book and the numbers are scary: if it takes you four days to read this book, then 5,700 children will have died from AIDS in that time and 7,014 children under 15 will have become infected with HIV.

The overwhelming majority of these children will have been infected through their mothers at birth. It would have cost around $5 for drugs to cut this infection rate by 50% but these mothers, like so many women in impoverished countries, wouldn’t have access to either the drugs or the information about them. That’s what UNICEF is about: changing lives for the better.