Dr Tara Shine: 'I believe humanity is good underneath it all'

This Much I Know: Dr Tara Shine, Environmental Scientist 

Kinsale based Environmental Scientist, Dr. Tara Shine

I was born in Canada. My mum and dad, Viney and Michael, were over there for two years working after they got married. They brought me home to Kilkenny six weeks after I was born and I've been in Ireland ever since. I have two younger sisters, Judy and Linda and two kids of my own now - Lauren is fourteen and Nathan is eleven. I am married to Jeremy, a marine scientist.

I didn't grow up saying I want to be an environmental scientist - that didn't really exist when I was growing up, I had to look really hard for that as a sixth-year student. I knew I liked animals and I thought for a while, I might be a vet. But I also knew I was really interested in the world around me and how it worked and what influence human beings have on all that. I set up the first Green Committee in my school, I was a member of the RSPCA, I was into anti-whaling... as a teenager, they were all the ways that you showed that you cared about the environment in the 1980s. Climate change really wasn't on the agenda back then.