Principal Investigator
Professor Eilionóir Flynn
Eilionóir is an Established Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Centre for Disability Law and Policy (CDLP), NUI Galway. She is a graduate of UCC (BCL, PhD) and has previously worked at the CDLP as a postdoctoral researcher, senior research fellow and senior lecturer. Eilionóir has published two monographs on national disability strategies and access to justice with Cambridge University Press and Routledge, and has edited a number of edited collections for Intersentia and Routledge. Her work on disability rights is widely published in international peer reviewed journals and her current research interests include legal capacity, access to justice, deprivation of liberty and the intersectionality of disability, gender and ageing. She is passionate about educating a new generation of disability activists and scholars, and has secured funding from the Irish Research Council to develop a network of early career researchers on disability rights on the island of Ireland.
Eilionóir currently holds an Investigator Award from Wellcome Trust for a research project on reproductive justice for disabled people in Ireland. From 2015-2018, Eilionóir held a European Research Council Starting Grant for the VOICES project, which documented the narratives of people with lived experience of legal capacity denial. She regularly collaborates with civil society organisations and disabled people’s organisations at national and international levels.In Ireland, she has co-ordinated the Civil Society Legal Capacity Coalition to influence the drafting of the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act and internationally she has supported the Secretariat of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, particularly the working group which developed General Comment 1.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr Suzanne Doyle Guilloud
Suzanne’s research interests are broadly in the areas of legal capacity and alternatives to coercion – with a particular focus on frameworks of involuntary detention. Her PhD thesis, for which she was awarded an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Research Scholarship, engaged in a critical analysis of the right to liberty of persons with psychosocial disabilities under both the CRPD and the ECHR. Prior to her doctoral studies, she practiced as a barrister for a number of years, having been called to the Bar of Ireland in 2006.
She previously worked at the CDLP as a researcher on a study for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Regional Office for Europe) which examined how European Structural and Investment Funds could be used to realise the right to live independently and be included in the community across the lifecourse in EU member states. She later undertook a study for the Council of Europe Rights of Persons with Disabilities Unit on the right to equal recognition before the law which examined ways in which Article 12 of the CRPD could be implemented by Council of Europe member states. From 2018 to 2021 she was a Senior Research Associate in Healthcare Law at the Centre for Health, Law, and Society at University of Bristol Law School, where she also taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Research Assistant
April Parker
April is a recent graduate from the LLM Disability Law & Policy at NUI Galway. Her dissertation focused on the obligation of the Irish government to support parents with disabilities in child-rearing. In 2019, she interned in the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Disability. While in Geneva, she helped draft a report for the OHCHR on the impact of ableism in medical and scientific practice. She has a BA in Philosophy and English Literature from University College Cork. As a young disabled woman, she has been involved in advocacy and activism for nearly a decade.