Members of the National Council

Catríona Crowe is Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland, and manager of the 1911 Census Online Project. She is one of the Editors of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, 1919 – 1941, Vice President of the Irish Labour History Society, and a former President of the Women’s History Association of Ireland. She is also Chairperson of the Irish Theatre Institute, and Chairperson of the SAOL Project, a rehabilitation project for women with addiction issues in Dublin’s North Inner City.

Dr. Brian Farrell is the Dublin City Coroner and past President of the Coroners Society of Ireland. A former consultant histopathologist and barrister-at-law, Dr. Farrell is a member of the Coroners Society of England and Wales and the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists. Dr. Farrell is the only full time coroner in Ireland. He has served on a number of high level committees on the Review of the Coroners Service and Bioethics. Dr. Farrell is the author of Coroners: Practice and Procedure, Roundhall 2000. A second edition of the textbook is in preparation.

Dr Ita Harnett is a Consultant in Palliative Medicine working at Galway Hospice as part of a joint appointment with Mayo General Hospital since 2007. She also works with the community palliative care teams in Galway and Mayo. Dr. Harnett spent 18 months with Hospice Africa and was clinical director in the hospice outside of Kampala, Uganda.

Geoff is originally from Queensland, Australia where he met his wife Hannah from Co. Mayo. They married in 1994 and returned to Ireland in 2001.

Geoff is a Medical Practitioner and was Medical Director of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, Queensland, for ten years prior to leaving Australia. Since 2001 he has been the Director and Medical Advisor to the Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council, a national agency which is largely concerned with education, training and practice standards for community resuscitation and ambulance care.

He is involved in developing supportive frameworks for collaborative practice with rural and remote nurses and indigenous health workers in Australia, and now with community responders and pre-hospital emergency care practitioners.

Dr. Deirdre Madden is a graduate of University College Cork, (BCL, LLM (law relating to surrogacy), PHD (law on assisted reproduction) and a qualified barrister-at-law. She is a Senior Lecturer in Law in UCC with research interests and publications in medical law and ethics. She was a member of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction (2000-2005) and has been a member of the Irish Medical Council since 2004.

In 2005 she was appointed by the Minister for Health to write a final report on post mortem practice and procedure, the Madden Report. Dr. Madden was also appointed Chairperson of the Commission on Patient Safety and Quality Assurance which published Building a Culture of Patient Safety, in July 2008.

She is a member of  national and international committees and research projects related to medical law and ethics. She is also a Fellow of the Hastings Center in the United States.

Una Marren trained as a nurse and midwife in the UK and worked for many years in various London teaching hospitals . She returned to Ireland in 2000 to become Deputy Director of Nursing at the Mater University Hospital in Dublin. She is chair of the Hospice Friendly Hospitals Standing Committee of the hospital and convenor of the network of Champions for Change. Her interests are emergency nursing and emergency planning within healthcare. She holds a Fellowship of the Institute of Emergency Planning and Civil Protection and has published many papers. Her interest in end of life care stems from a passion to deliver quality care to patients and their families at all times but especially at difficult times such as in cases of sudden death.

Gus Nichols is the seventh generation of his family in Nichols of Lombard Street, Dublin, funeral directors. The company was started in 1814. Gus graduated in economics and geography from Trinity College Dublin and worked abroad before returning to Nichols in Dublin after the death of his father in 1996.

Last year he became a director of Fanagans funeral directors which had merged with Nichols in 1988. He was president of the Irish Association of Funeral Directors in 2004 and next year he will be president of FIAT-IFTA, the world organisation of funeral directors.

Sean O’Laoire is a former President of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (2007 – 2009) and is current a director of MÓLA Architecture. He was educated at UCD and at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Over a period of 30 years in private practice he has been responsible for a range of award winning architectural and urban design projects. He has been an advocate of the role of architecture as a social art, and has lectured and writing extensively on the subject.