RESEARCH MATTERS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Research Associate
- Managing Director of Community Engagement Partners Limited
Ciaran Lynch is the Managing Director of Community Engagement Partners Limited having retired as the Development Manager of LIT in 2016. He has a background in sociology, town planning, rural development and governance.
He worked as a local authority planner for over 20 years and was The Planning and Development Officer for County Clare for 13 years.
He was formerly the Head of the Sustainable Rural Development Department at Tipperary Institute and subsequently the Development Manager of LIT. During this time he lectured on many topics including governance, strategic planning, land-use planning, sociology, politics rural development, community development and law.
He is a former Director of the National Rural Network and was a member of the CEDRA Expert Advisory Group. He has also been Chair of the Tipperary Energy Agency, of the North Tipperary Sports Partnership and the LIT Research and Development Subcommittee, as well as a member of the County Tipperary Economic SPC and the Research Ethics Committee of LIT. He is still a member of the Tipperary LECP Steering Committee and of the Boards of the Tipperary Volunteer Centre, Kilkee Waterworld, the North Tipperary Green Enterprise Centre, Thurles Chamber Enterprise Centre, Thurles Community Projects and Communities Creating Jobs.
In addition to his work in Local Authorities he has led many development projects including local and regional social and economic strategies, community planning projects, EU-funded Interreg, Erasmus and Horizon 2020 projects. He has extensive experience in organisational development and governance both for national and community-based organisations and is a committee or Board member of many voluntary organisations.
He has presented papers and given presentations at many national and international conferences. He has both led and participated in research projects both qualitative and quantitative generally in the community and socio-economic areas and has edited and contributed to a number of publications relating to the general areas of rural and community development and participatory decision-making.
Kieran holds a PhD, Master of Public Administration and B Comm degrees from UCD and an M.Sc (Public Sector Analysis) degree from Trinity College.
For the last six years, Kieran has been working in the field of research and evaluation and as an independent consultant and trainer. Between January 2009 and February 2012 he was Director of Regimes in the Irish Prison Service. Reporting to the Director General, he had policy responsibility for prisoner care and rehabilitation. Relevant achievements during this period were the introduction of new programmes for sex and violent offenders, design and implementation of an incentivised regimes policy, expansion of education and work training facilities and revitalisation of sentence planning for prisoners, all of which required significant project planning and management. From May 2006 to January 2009 he was Deputy Director in both the Regimes and Operations Directorates. As Deputy Director of Operations, he had responsibility for policy issues relating to security, safety and discipline in the prisons and control and management of prisoner numbers.
For twelve years prior to that, he was Head of Research in the Garda Síochána, reporting to the Assistant Commissioner for Strategy and Services. A significant focus of much of the work was on young offenders. Between 1988 and 1994 he worked in the Public Management Service of the Organisation for Economic and Social Development, Paris, and before that he worked in a number of Government Departments.
Dr Sinéad Hanafin has been researching for almost 30 years and has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers, reports, book chapters and editorials. She is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences and workshops and recently presented her work in Norway, Turkey and the United States as well as Ireland. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin.
Her passion for making research useful comes from her experiences of working in practice as a nurse, midwife and public health nurse; of working in academia as a lecturer and researcher and of working in policy as Head of Research at the Department of Health and Children for almost 10 years.
She has extensive expertise across a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods and has led large scale surveys, multi-method evaluations and a number of strategic developments around research and data. She has an expertise in subject matter areas such as strategic research and data development, health and well-being, community nursing and children's lives.
Dr Hanafin's expertise is grounded in her educational background in nursing as well as research. She holds a Diploma in Research Methods (Royal College of Surgeons Ireland), M.Sc (Trinity College Dublin) and PhD (King's College London). She has also completed a European PhD programme having studied at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Lund University, Sweden and Edinburgh University, Scotland. She is committed to continuous professional development and has recently completed an accredited course with the UK National Economic Forum on Social Return on Investment.