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.