Professor Conor O’Mahony

His address is entitled ‘State Responses to Historical Child Protection Issues - Has Ireland Owned its Past Yet?’. It will take place on 22 November at 2pm in the Graduates Memorial Building of Trinity College Dublin.

Professor O’Mahony is currently a full-time professor in the School of Law in University College Cork. His research interests lie primarily in constitutional and child law with a particular interest in family and children’s rights.

He is highly regarded in these fields recurrently delivering expert testimony to Oireachtas Committees as well as the Constitutional Convention and Citizen’s Assembly. He has written extensively published in these areas with articles published in such international journals as the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Public Law, the Human Rights Law Review, the International Journal of Children’s Rights, the Harvard Human Rights Journal, the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, the Child and Family Law Quarterly, the International Journal of Children’s Rights and Children and Youth Services Review.

In 2019 Professor O’Mahony was appointed by the Irish government as Special Rapporteur for Child Protection for a three-year term. Over the course of his term he published a range of reports notably one on illegal birth registration which highlighted both State awareness and inaction in this area. He is also the Director of the Child Law Clinic in UCC through which he works to support litigation concerning children and advocate for law reform in related areas.

The TCLR Distinguished Speaker Series seeks to to promote critical and original discourse and, since 2006, has seen countless legal experts speak at Trinity College on a range of topical issues to students.