At an age when some might take their earnings and buy an eco-friendly villa in Tuscany, Roddick is in Dublin to try and catalyse financial support for one of her favourite causes, Amnesty International. The human rights NGO is building up its Dublin premises to include a training and education centre and conference facilities, expected to cost 3m. Roddick has just donated 500,000 towards the project.

We sit down in a quiet nook of the Berkeley Court. "Having a geography for a human rights organisation is for me a moral measurement.

Southern Ireland is more generous per capita than any other country on earth and I donated to corral the local business community into joining me."

Before I can even ask, the words pour from her as if a dam has burst. "It's exactly what I should be doing. Time is the new currency. I want to use the time in the best way I can."

She wants to garner support for human rights because "governments are lousy at it", she says. "They don't measure themselves on how they look after the weak and the frail any more. They're just economic governments."

The Body Shop that she built on business principles she says she learned by studying the Quakers passed from local ownership earlier this year, sold on to the L'Oreal cosmetics company . . . a sale that generated some protest from like-minded supporters of her brand of 'ethical capitalism' but one that she doesn't put among her regrets. Not directly, anyway. But she does look back on the 1985 IPO of the company, despite a mostly high-performing share price and multiple stock splits, as a mistake.

"I should never have gone public. But you couldn't know that at the time. It was so heady, it gave us the capital to pursue vertical integration and to take care of families in the villages we operated in."

She first realised it was a mistake in the late 1990s. "We realised we were only being measured by profit and loss. They were indifferent if it incorporated social justice or workers' rights. I was looking at the City and seeing more financial fascism."

There were discussions about going private, but "each time we screwed up. Eventually, we figured, at least it's the devil you know".

But with so many big companies being taken private lately, some have expressed a concern that with that trend has come a loss of transparency and accountability. Roddick shakes her head.

"What can you say was accountable about Enron? You may be public but you can still have tricky financial auditing. Even KPMG and Pricewaterhouse in many cases don't do that good a job. I don't think the issue is being less transparent, I think the dilemma is a question of bigness. I speak to social entrepreneurs who say they want to get big. I say, why? Why wouldn't you want to be a small giant, embedded in your communities. It's the bigness I see as a problem. When you're bigger you need a whole new set of skills. Usually they come from organisations shaped by business schools, which doesn't allow for creativity, time for reflection. Going public never allows you to be reflective. It's just, 'produce more profits'. The expectations from the financial journalists were even worse."

In recent weeks Roddick caused something of a stir with an article in the Financial Times, writing that business schools aren't great at encouraging entrepreneurship of any sort.

"I don't think you can teach entrepreneurship, at least in a business school. A business school is very systemised. It's not like that.

You're crazy. You're obsessive. It's like a pathology. It comes with no organisation, structure.

You have more in common with a crazy person."

Roddick is credited for helping to start the global trends that have led to a rise of so-called "social entrepreneurship", something that the Trinity College Dublin business school has from this autumn added as a required course of study before receiving a Trinity MBA.

"Social entrepreneurship is the most creative thing I'm seeing now. I do a monthly event in the British Library as a surgery for social entrepreneurs. But I don't know if you can teach that either. You can teach system thinking, but can you teach craziness?"

Roddick is the product of an Italian immigrant family that ran a cafe catering for local fisherman . . . it stayed open after the other cafes had closed and until the last fisherman went home. She credits those experiences as the source of her entrepreneurial spirit.

"Radical thinking, pushed on by dissatisfaction. It's why immigrants often make the best entrepreneurs. They're hardworking, they're obsessional. If you have a definition of entrepreneurship that doesn't include freedom, you're not there. Freedom from the system, freedom from being told what to do. Business schools do polish the better business person, but they're the ones who should be running organisations. I'm just not sure they should be founding them."

Her first moves towards what's become known either as 'social entrepreneurship' or 'corporate social responsibility' began in the 1980s as part of a group of flamboyant business owners including Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame and Patagonia, the outdoor clothing chain.

They shared ideas of how to improve work practices for employees. But Roddick is candid about their limits."We were arrogant. We were so po-faced. We weren't political."

While their efforts changed the way companies talk about business, they had unintended consequences that send her into fits.

"The bloody management consultants made a fortune on corporate social responsibility, which is nothing more than greenwashing.

Getting a photo taken with a photogenic baby, nothing more than chequebook charity. But if something gets in the way of profits? Nothing gets in the way of profits. So corporate social responsibility. We were some of the architects but it quickly left our hands but became CSR . . . and I don't think it worked."

She is passionate in talking about the role of NGOs in helping to curb what she sees as the worst corporate abuses, coupled with what she calls the "vigilante consumer" who insists on a fully ethical supply chain. But what happens when consumer trends bring two sets of values she holds dear into conflict?

Food miles . . . the distance which products have to travel from the developing world to the west, causing an increase in carbon emissions in the process . . . are increasingly being pushed onto corporate agendas by an alliance of environmental groups and local producers.

What if a Kenyan village that has been made relatively prosperous by supplying certain commodities to Europe suddenly finds that western companies don't want to take the public relations hit of the "carbon footprint"? She warns that the issue is prone to oversimplification but admits that the conflict between the two causes she holds dear will be a growing concern.

"It's going to be an interesting one. The environment versus human rights." When pressed about which should be given primacy, however, she does not hesitate. "For me it's always human rights and it's poverty eradication. I think it's an oversimplification, a bit disingenuous. I wish we called it bloody love miles. I go to visit my grandkids in Santa Barbara. My other daughter hits me over the head and says, what are you doing? It's carbon, it's this. It's love miles."

Someone from Amnesty pops her head in to signal that time has expired, but Roddick has no plans to stop. She names her mum as her first hero. "My Mum is wild. She taught me it's more complicated than love and work. She's wild, funny and articulate."

She also has an unusual request. Now 92, Roddick's mother has asked her to help plan her funeral. Mimicking her mother's Italian accent Roddick says, "I wanna da best funeral. I wanna my ashes in a-fireworks. I want a big rocket."

No one does ashes in fireworks in England, she says. Those who followed Roddick's career as it streaked across the sky may beg to differ.

CV

Anita Roddick Age: 64.
Born: Littlehampton, England.
Married: to Gordon Roddick (1970); they have two daughters.

Worked as a teacher on an Israeli kibbutz, and with the International Labour Organisation at UN offices in Geneva. Opened The Body Shop in Littlehampton, England with Gordon, in 1976. In 1985 The Body Shop goes public; Roddick founds partnership with Greenpeace. In 2002, with more than 2000 shops, the Roddicks step back from dayto-day management of the company; in 2006 The Body Shop is sold to L'Oreal for around 975m and delists from London stock exchange.

Heroes: Irish-American activist Mother Jones; her mother.