Meet Our Board of Management

Leon is a Tallaght native from Springfield. He is a mixed-race man with heritage from Senegal and Ireland. He is the founder of “Black and Irish,” an organisation tackling racism in Ireland and building representation across different areas of Irish society. He is a former student union president of Maynooth University and holds a degree in psychology.

Madeleine Mulrennan works as an independent consultant specialising in education matters and professional regulation. She has previously worked in further education and in teacher education. She was President of St. Catherine’s College of Education, Sion Hill, from 2000 to 2007. She was a Special Advisor (policy) in two government departments. Madeleine is a graduate of the University of Dublin, Trinity College, and the Dublin Institute of Technology and has degrees in education, community health, and law. She is a member of the Governing Authority of Maynooth University and recently chaired the review of Home Economics at Junior Cycle for the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment.

Elizabeth Nixon is an Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin. She is the director of the undergraduate degree program in psychology. She is a graduate of University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin. Her research and teaching interests lie in parenting and family as a context for children’s development. She is a Co-Investigator of Growing up in Ireland, the first national longitudinal study of children’s development in Ireland. She established and co-directs the Infant and Child Research Lab at Trinity, where she researches parent-child interactions.

Anita Nolan is a qualified Social Worker and a proud member of the Tallaght West Community. She is a graduate of the Liberties College Dublin, and the University of Dublin, Trinity College. Anita has worked with children and families since 2012, in Ireland and abroad. Her work experience to date includes early years childcare, working with women and children fleeing domestic violence, child protection social work, and working with young people at risk. Anita is particularly interested in programmes and approaches that empower people, increase resilience, and create better outcomes for children and families.

Guidance Counsellor with DDLETB, and President of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors. Catriona is from Tallaght, Dublin 24, and has studied in IT Tallaght 2005, UCD 2006, Trinity 2013 and Maynooth University 2022. She is passionate about lifelong education and believes it needs to be accessible for all, regardless of financial or family status.

Catriona is the President of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors and has been a post primary school teacher and guidance counsellor for almost twenty years. She has worked in multiple roles including Additional Educational Needs Coordinator, Home School Community Liaison and Student Support Coordinator. The values that motivate her are inclusion and equality for all. Working with children from different backgrounds with different experiences, she values and appreciates how unique each individual is and how important it is for them to be empowered to find their pathway.

Promoting Children’s Rights across all levels of society not just for children from minority backgrounds, with additional educational needs or from disadvantaged backgrounds but for all children in all communities across Ireland. Catriona believes that true inclusion does not mean making space for others, it is the adoption of a universal design approach to education, our lives and workplaces. Empowering children and young people to advocate for themselves and enabling society to take action for positive, sustainable change. As a guidance counsellor Catriona adopts the holistic model of guidance counselling in her interactions with learners, facilitating the educational, vocational and most importantly their personal and social development so that they are better equipped to navigate their pathway. Catriona understands that adopting a trauma informed care approach can lead to better outcomes for children and their families.

Siobhán Swaine, a National College of Ireland graduate with a Degree in European Business and Languages, is an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and the Insurance Institute of Ireland. As a HR Manager in the Financial Services sector with 19 years of HR experience, Siobhán excels in partnering with senior leaders, aligning HR strategies with business goals. Her expertise spans Recruitment, Employee Relations, HR Operations, and Organisational Transformations. Originally from Co. Monaghan and now residing in Tallaght, Siobhán, a mother of three daughters, actively engages in community-based programmes.

Emer Woodfull Emer is a practicing barrister at the Law Library Dublin who was called to the Bar in 2003. She has a background in child, criminal, investigative, inquiry and employment law and is a Chairperson appointed by the Mental Health Commission to conduct tribunals. She was previously an award-winning current affairs broadcaster and series producer for RTE, the national broadcaster. In her early career, she worked as a teacher in Ballymun and a school for young offenders. She is a Board member of Oberstown Children Detention Campus.

Noel McCarthy is Professor of Population Health Medicine in Trinity College Dublin. He studied medicine at Trinity qualifying in 1989 and has worked in hospital medicine and public health in Ireland, Sweden and Africa. Before returning to Ireland in 2021 he worked in England as a Consultant in Public Health Medicine in Public Health England, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Warwick and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. This included work across a wide range of public health topics and populations. 

Geraldine is a community activist and volunteer in Tallaght West and been involved in working with the community her entire life.

She has been involved with CDI for more than eight years since she took part in Restorative Practice training and then went on to complete the Train the Trainers course. Geraldine is on all the community forums in the local area and believes that participation and showing up is the most important part of making sure you have the right information for the right person at the right time.
Geraldine spent two years involved with the Tallaght West Parents’ Network where she trained parents in all 13 local schools about the importance of parental participation and how to run a parents association.

She currently runs a women’s group in Glenshane every Wednesday morning and has experience being a parent representative on her children’s school board on occasion during their school years.

Dr. Graham Finlay is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin. He is also currently Vice Principal for Widening Participation in the College of Social Sciences and Law and has engaged in a number of groups concerned with promoting disabled people’s rights and educational disadvantage, including serving as chair of the Board of Management of a DEIS school in Inchicore. He has published a number of articles and reports on the theory of human rights, human rights policy, migrants’ rights and citizenship education.