Dr. Eilionóir Flynn

Contact Information

Phone: +353 (0)91 49 4010
Fax:  +353 (0)91 49 5569
Office: Room 205, Centre for Disability Law and Policy, North Campus, NUI Galway
email: eilionoir.flynnnuigalway.ie
Skype: eilionoirflynnnuigalway

Biography

Eilionóir is presently the Senior Research Fellow (with responsibility for the Research Programme) at the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, National University of Ireland Galway.

Her interest in disability law stemmed from a broader interest in social justice and a recognition of the invisibility of people with disabilities at the time in broader human rights discourse. Her current passions in this field include assisted and supported decision-making, rights-enforcement mechanisms and access to justice.

Eilionóir is a graduate of University College Cork (BCL, 2006 and PhD, 2010) and has been working at the Centre for Disability Law and Policy since 2009. She was awarded an IRCHSS scholarship for her PhD thesis, which explored the potential of a right to advocacy to improve access to justice for people with disabilities and examined the implementation of this right in the domestic legal framework of Ireland and the Australian State of Victoria, using principles of international human rights law as a basis for reform. As part of her PhD research, she was an Honorary Visiting Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where she worked with Professor Lee Ann Basser and observed practice at the Office of the Public Advocate.

She joined the CDLP as a postdoctoral researcher for a project on National Disability Strategies. This project involved a comparative study of 11 National Disability Strategies worldwide (with a focus on Ireland’s National Disability Strategy 2004), and its key findings were a set of critical success factors which enable National Disability Strategies to become vehicles for the effective implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities at domestic level. Eilionóir wrote a book based on this research for Cambridge University Press, entitled: From Rhetoric to Action: Implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, published in August 2011.

In May 2011, Eilionóir became the Senior Research Fellow in the CDLP and has responsibility for the Centre’s research programme and activities, as outlined in the Centre’s new Business Plan 2011-2014. Some of the research activities contained in this plan include research on legal capacity and supported decision making; independent living and individual budgets; financial independence, corporate culture and disability; and advocacy and access to justice.

Eilionóir is currently a member of the National Advocacy Service working group to develop a non-instructed advocacy policy, and is represented on the Regional Advisory Group for the Service (Region 5: West/North West). In her personal capacity, she is also an external member of the Human Rights Committee of the Brothers of Charity (Galway), which reviews any restrictions placed on the rights of people with disabilities who use these services.

Eilionóir is also a member of the Academic Network of European Disability experts Working Group to develop a monitoring tool for the European Union Disability Strategy 2010-2020. She is also a regular contributor to the Human Rights in Ireland blog and is co-editing the blog with Liam Thornton until September 2011.

Publications

• Flynn, E., From Rhetoric to Action Implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  
• Flynn, E., “A Socio-Legal Analysis of Advocacy for People with Disabilities – Competing Concepts of ’Best Interests’ and Empowerment in Legislation and Policy on Statutory Advocacy Services” (2010) 32(1) Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law forthcoming.
  
• Flynn, E. “Ireland’s Compliance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – Towards a Rights-Based Approach for Legal Reform?” [2009] 31 Dublin University Law Journal 358.
• Flynn, E., “Community Visitors, Invisible Lives… the Forgotten Recommendation of the Goodbody Report on Developing Advocacy Services for People with Disabilities” Volume 16 Irish Student Law Review 2008. This article was awarded the prize for Best Article in the Journal.
• Flynn, E., “Access to Services for People with Disabilities” Volume 6 Cork Online Law Review 2007.

Selected Conference Papers

• ’Reclaiming Human Rights in Enforcement Mechanisms for People with Disabilities from Political Question to Universal Norm’ at the Centre for Law and Society, Lancaster University, Conference on ’From the Utopianism of Human Rights to the Primacy of the Political’, November 2008. This paper has been submitted to Glasshouse-Routledge for publication in an edited collection from the conference.
• ’A Case for the Right to Advocacy in International Human Rights Law’ at the International Graduate Legal Researchers Conference, King’s College London, June 2008
• ’Best Interests vs. Empowerment – Comparing and Contrasting Legal and Sociological Principles in Advocacy Services for People with Disabilities’, Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference in Manchester University, March 2008.
• ’A Socio-Legal Analysis of Advocacy Services for People with Disabilities’ at Conference for Postgraduate Research Students in Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Commerce and Law, University College Cork, December 2007.
  

Guest Lectures

• ’The Legal Regulation of Advocacy Services for People with Disabilities in Ireland under the Citizens Information Act 2007 – A Critical Analysis’ in Welfare Law, University College Cork, February 2008.

• ’A Comparative Study of Advocacy Services for People with Disabilities in Ireland and Victoria’, Faculty of Law and Management, La Trobe University, Melbourne, October 2007.

Centre for Disability Law and Policy, National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland.
Tel: +353 (0)91 495888, SMS/Text Phone: +353 (0)87 6660634, Fax: +353 (0) 91 495569
Email: info.cdlpnuigalway.ie

This page was last updated Friday, March 30, 2012