Donncha O'Connell

Donncha O’Connell is an Established Professor of Law at University of Galway. He teaches European Human Rights on undergraduate programmes and Processes of Law Reform and Advocacy, Activism and Public Interest Law on the LL.M in Public Law. He also contributes to the teaching of Constitutional Law.

He was Dean of the Faculty of Law at University of Galway from 2005 to 2008, prior to the establishment of the College of Business, Public Policy and Law, and Head of the School of Law from 2013 to 2017. He is a Commissioner (part-time) of the Law Reform Commission, having been appointed by the government on the nomination of the Attorney General, Máire Whelan SC, in 2012. He is also a member of the Legal Aid Board.

Donncha is the founder and editor of the Irish Human Rights Law Review, an edited collection published biennially by Clarus Press, and the Ireland Correspondent for the International Survey section of the journal Public Law. He was previously the Senior Irish member of FRALEX and lead author of various reports. FRALEX was the legal expert group, appointed following a competitive tender process, that advised the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) based in Vienna from 2007 to 2011.

Donncha was called to the Irish Bar in 1992 and joined the Faculty of Law at University of Galway (then UCG) in 1993, having completed an LL.M at the University of Edinburgh. From 1999 to 2002, while on leave of absence from University of Galway, he was the first full-time Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, an NGO founded in 1976 by Mary Robinson and the late Kader Asmal.

Upon returning to University of Galway in 2002, he was appointed as the Irish member of the EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights, established by the European Commission on the recommendation of the European Parliament LIBE Committee. As a member of this Network, he wrote annual national reports which formed part of Synthesis Reports submitted to the EU Commission and Parliament. He contributed to the four Thematic Comments published by the Network and to Opinions furnished to the Commission on topics including ethnic profiling, extraordinary renditions, discrimination in age limits for sexual offences, political participation rights, gay rights, violent radicalisation and terrorism, conscientious objection, racism and xenophobia, national human rights institutions and the rules of criminal evidence.

Donncha has participated as a Council of Europe expert in several judicial training programmes in Croatia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and has worked in a similar capacity in other countries with the Netherlands Helsinki Federation and INTERIGHTS.

In 2006, he became a member of the Board of Directors of the internationally renowned Druid Theatre Company. He also chaired the Programme Forum of FOMACS, a collaborative public media project based in DIT, for a number of years, and was (until appointed to the Legal Aid Board) a member of the Advisory Board of the Public Interest Law Alliance (PILA), both funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies.

From 2002 to 2005, he was a member of the National Council of the Free Legal Advice Centres (FLAC) Ltd and of the Executive Committee of Amnesty International Ireland. He co-edited (with Mike Milotte) five monographs in the Justice in Controversy series published by Irish Academic Press. In 2009, he edited and wrote the Foreword to 60 Years, 30 Perspectives: Ireland and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a collection of essays published by New Island Books and Amnesty International.

Donncha spent the academic year 2009–2010 as a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he completed the LSE Certificate in International Human Rights Law Practice. He served on the Board of Directors of INTERIGHTS, The International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, from 2009 to 2012.

In 2011, he contested the election to Seanad Éireann in the NUI constituency, coming sixth out of twenty-seven candidates on first-preference votes. In the same year, he was shortlisted for the Irish seat on the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) and ranked first on the shortlist by the relevant sub-committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

In the past, he has been a visiting and guest lecturer at Boston College (USA), Columbia University (USA), l’Université de Poitiers (France), Montana State University (USA), Roosevelt University in Chicago (USA), the Department of Social Studies (TCD), the Law School (TCD) and the Equality Studies Centre (UCD). Donncha is a regular contributor to news and current affairs programmes in English and Irish language media, and writes occasional opinion pieces on law and politics for newspapers and magazines.