Members of the National Council

Dr. Siobhán O’Halloran, PhD, MSc, FFNMRCSI, BNS, RGN, RMHN, RNT, is Assistant National Director with Acute Hospital Services, & Palliative Care HSE, and has responsibility for the strategic management of all acute services in the HSE. She was previously the Nursing & Midwifery Services Director for the HSE and in this role established the Office of the Nursing Services Director.

Dr O’Halloran has worked with the Health Services Reform Programme and has been involved in the development and implementation of effective and efficient nursing and midwifery strategies across the HSE. She was appointed executive director of the National Implementation Committee (Pre-registration Nursing Degree Programme) during which time she was responsible for overseeing the transition of pre-registration nursing education from the health sector to the education sector.

Prior to that Dr. O’Halloran was Head of the School of Nursing, Midwifery, Health Studies and Applied Science at Dundalk Institute of Technology. She has had an extensive career in health, working as a nurse adviser (education/research/intellectual disability) with the Department of Health and Children. She has also been a lecturer with Dublin City University and has held numerous teaching, administrative and clinical posts in the health sector.

Dr. O’Halloran is well published in education, nursing and disability and is currently leading on a number of acute strategies for the HSE and is the HSE designated lead for Palliative Care.

From 1983 until his retirement in 2007, Bob Carroll served as the chief executive ofthree statutory agencies focusing on the welfare of older people in Ireland: the National Council for the Aged, the National Council for the Elderly and the National Council on Ageing and Older People (NCAOP). These councils published nearly a 100 reports with recommendations for policy and action on awide range of subjects of importance to older people.

Following retirement, Bob Carroll prepared a joint statement on end-of- life care for older people in acute and long-stay care settings for the NCAOP and the Irish Hospice Foundation.

He also prepared a report of the proceedings of the year-long Forum on End of Life established by the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF) “to promote a national conversation on dying, death and bereavement”. The report, Perspectives on End of Life: Report of the Forum 2009, was accompanied by a Draft Action Plan for consideration by theNational Council of the Forum on End of Life in Ireland established by the IHF in 2010.

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.

Sharon Foley is CEO of the Irish Hospice Foundation since May 2011. Through her strategic management consultancy, One2One Solutions (established 2006), Ms Foley had previously worked in an advisory capacity for a range of voluntary and state agencies.

Prior to that she was first CEO of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency; and was Director of Health Promotion with two former Health Boards, covering the East Coast and Midlands areas. Ms Foley holds Master’s degrees from NUI Galway and Trinity College Dublin.

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.

Dr Geoff King 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.

Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness, a retired Supreme Court judge, is outgoing President of the Law Reform Commission. She was born in Belfast and educated in Belfast and Dublin (Alexandra College, TCD and the King's Inns). She was called to the Irish Bar in 1977.  In 1989 she was called to the Inner Bar, and called to the Bar of New South Wales in 1993.

She has served on An Bord Uchtála (the Adoption Board), the Voluntary Health Insurance Board, the National Economic and Social Council, the Second Commission on the Status of Women, and has chaired the National Social Services Board, the Board of National College of Art and Design, the Employment Equality Agency, the Kilkenny Incest Investigation and the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation.

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.

Ita Mangan is a barrister who specialises in citizens' and welfare rights. She has written extensively on these rights over many years. She has been contributing to the publications and databases of the Citizens Information Board for about 30 years. She was a member of the Expert Group on the Integration of Tax and Social Welfare that reported to the Government in 1996.  

She has been a Consultant to a number of Government departments and agencies on issues such as age discrimination and the rights of older people. As well as being an External Reviewer with the Revenue Commissioners, she is a member of the Commission of Investigation into clerical child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese and of the Residential Institutions Redress Review Committee.

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.

Professor David Smith is associate Professor of Health Care Ethics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and Director of the MSc in Health Care Ethics and Law in RCSI and RCSI-MUB.  He is a Visiting Professor in Health Care Ethics in Trinity College Dublin, and the Medical University of Bahrain.  He is also Visiting Professor in Business Ethics to the Smurfit Business School, University College Dublin. 

He is a member of the Irish Council for Bioethics, the Ethics Working Party of the European Forum for Good Clinical Practice and the Ethics Review Group of the Irish Medical Council. He is an Ethics Consultant to the Bon Secours Health System, Daughters of Charity Services for People with Intellectual Disability, Mercy University Hospital, Beaumont University Hospital, Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary Services, and the Church of Ireland’s Ethics Committee.

He is a member of a number of Research Ethics Committees in Ireland and the United Kingdom.  Currently he is involved in a research project with the Irish Hospice Foundation in developing ethical guidelines for a “Good Death”.

Max Watson trained in theology, medicine, and general practice. He has worked in Nepal for eight years, setting up a General Practice training programme. He returned to Northern Ireland to complete training in Palliative Care in London and Belfast.  He is visiting Professor in Palliative Medicine in the University of Ulster, Consultant at the Northern Ireland Hospice and Honorary Consultant in Palliative Medicine at the Princess Alice Hospice, in Surrey.

He is clinical adviser to the Hospice Friendly Hospitals programme of the Irish Hospice Foundation. He is author of the Oxford Handbook of Palliative Care, Oxford Core text Oncology, The Oxford GP Library Pain and Palliation, the UK Network Palliative Care Guidelines and is series editor of the Oxford specialist end of life handbooks.  He is the originator of the European Certificate in Essential Palliative Care course that has trained over 5,000 doctors and nurses since it began in 2001 and is now running in Nepal, India, Kyrgyzstan as well as six centres across the UK and Ireland every six months.

He chairs the Northern Ireland Palliative Medicine Consultants Group and RCGP End of Life Care Strategy group. He has just completed projects researching the impact of end-of-life care on the relatives of those bereaved through dementia, and the use of CPR in hospices across the UK and Ireland.