Roberts’s father, Rex Roberts, played double bass with a dance band called The Melodists in the 1940s. The headmaster at The High School, Dublin, calls his father in one day to suggest that he consider move his son to a boarding school as he is spending a lot of time in detention.
After being bribed with the promise of a bicycle, Roberts is moved to a Quaker-run boarding school, Newtown School, Waterford. The move proves successful but not for the anticipated reasons. He quickly takes notice of the electric guitars of the school band and realizes that is to be his future.
In 1976, Roberts and Johnnie Fingers (Moylett) decide to put a band together and, between them, they recruit the other four members, Pete Briquette (bass), Gerry Cott (guitar), Simon Crowe (drums) and singer Bob Geldof to form The Boomtown Rats.
Following the breakup of The Boomtown Rats in 1986, Roberts works with Simply Red, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Flesh For Lulu in the role of audio engineer on tours in the UK and the United States. He avoids playing the guitar in public for ten years, after which he and Simon Crowe play together for four years in the rhythm and blues four-piece band The Velcro Flies.
After fifteen successful years as an Independent Financial Adviser, Roberts becomes disillusioned with the life insurance industry and becomes a central heating engineer to keep himself occupied between gigs. Roberts and Crowe, with Darren Beale on second lead guitar, and Peter Barton on bass guitar and lead vocals, are now playing together as Boomtown Rats Roberts and Crowe, and are performing material from the Boomtown Rats’ first three albums across Europe and the UK.
Childers is born to Erskine Hamilton Childers (Ireland’s fourth President) and his first wife Ruth Ellen Dow. He grows up in a multi-cultural atmosphere which influences his whole life. From an early age, he has an obvious fascination with history and world affairs. He studies at Newtown School, Waterford and much later on at Trinity College, Dublin and Stanford University. At Stanford he is actively involved with the National Student Association and rises to Vice-President of the organisation by 1949.
By 1960, Childers is in London working for the BBC in both radio and television. His broadcasts from the BBC World Service range on varying topics from the Suez Crisis and Palestine to the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963. He is one of the first presenters at the start of the BBC TV show The Money Programme in 1966. The Suez Canal and Palestine issues later form the basis of his writing on the subjects.
Childers is distinguished as one of the first mainstream writers in the West to systematically challenge the contention that Palestinian Arab refugees of the 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War fled their homes primarily from Arab broadcast evacuation orders, rather than from the use of force and terror by armed forces of the newly forming state of Israel.
Childers specialises in UN issues, even serving as a periodic consultant including a special mission in the Congo for Secretary-GeneralU Thant. In 1967, under the leadership of Henry Richardson Labouisse, Jr., he is hired to lead a United Nations, UNICEF and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) programme called Development Support Communication. In 1968 he co-authors a paper with United Nations colleague Mallica Vajrathon called “Project Support Communication,” later published in an important anthology about social change.
From 1975 to 1988, Childers is based in New York as Director of Information for UNDP. By his retirement in 1989 after 22 years of service as Senior Advisor to the UN Director General for Development and International Economic Co-operation, Childers had worked with most of the organisations of the UN system, at all levels and in all regions.
After his retirement, Childers continues to strive relentlessly for the ideals for which he had worked so hard. He co-authors several notable books for the Ford Foundation and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation on the reform of the United Nations with his colleague and equally devoted United Nations civil servant, Sir Brian Urquhart. The best known of these publications is A World in Need of Leadership. He continues writing on United Nations matters while traveling constantly and lecturing on the Organisation and the many challenges confronting it, such as globalisation and democracy, conflict prevention and peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, human rights, famine, ageing and development, health, financial arrangement of the United Nations, citizen’s rights, female participation, design and perceptions, education, the North South divide and world economy. In 1995 he co-authors a paper with his international law colleague Marjolijn Snippe called The Agenda for Peace and the Law of the Sea, for Pacem in Maribus XXIII, the Annual Conference of the International Ocean Institute, that is held in Costa Rica, December 1995.
seamus dubhghaill 