DIRECTOR, UCD INSTITUTE OF CRIMINOLOGY

Professor Paul O'Connor BCL, Barrister-at-Law, LLM. Paul A. O'Connor studied law at University College Dublin where he graduated with BCL and LLM degrees. He subsequently obtained the professional legal qualification of Barrister-at-Law degree from King's Inns and continued with his legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania where he obtained a Master's in Law specialising in Criminal Justice. Following a brief period in practise in the United States he returned to Ireland and UCD and commenced his career as a legal academic. He resumed contact with the United States in the 1980's where he spent the academic year 1987/88 as a Fulbright Fellow at the law school of the University of Michigan.

UCD's Research Management System includes a list of publications for Professor O'Connor

Professor Ian O'Donnell MA, MPhil, PhD, LLD. Before taking up a research position at the UCD Institute of Criminology, Ian O'Donnell was Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (1997-2000); Research Officer at the Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research and Fellow of Linacre College (1992-1997); and Research Assistant at the University of London (1989-1992).

He sat as a magistrate on the Oxford Bench and was a member of the Board of Visitors at Pentonville Prison in London. Ian is also a member of the International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation. 

UCD's Research Management System includes a list of publications for Professor O'Donnell

Research Interests include Criminal Justice Policy, Sentencing, Penal Reform, Imprisonment, History of Crime and Punishment, Violence

Professor O'Donnell completed a six-year term as Director of the UCD Institute of Criminology in December 2010.

PhD Supervision
Professor O'Donnell welcomes approaches for supervision from prospective PhD students.criminology@ucd.ie

Dr Deirdre Healy (Deirdre.Healy@ucd.ie) is a lecturer in Criminology.  She obtained her primary degree in Psychology and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin and then completed her doctorate at the UCD Institute of Criminology.  Her thesis explored the influence of psychological, social and criminal justice factors on desistance from crime.  She subsequently moved to NUI Galway to work on a study of attrition in rape cases.  Following this, she was employed as a research officer in the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Sheffield on the “Sheffield Pathways out of Crime Study.”  In 2008 she returned to UCD to take up an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the UCD Institute of Criminology, during which, she conducted the Crime, Desistance and Reintegration Study, which involved a long-term follow-up of the sample interviewed for her doctoral research.  The study provides a detailed account of pathways to, and from, desistance and identifies the psychological and social processes involved in these transitions.  The project constituted the second phase of the first prospective study of desistance in Ireland and will be one of a small number of international studies of this kind.  Deirdre has also written a book The Dynamics of Desistance: Charting Pathways through Change, available now from Willan Publishing.

UCD's Research Management System includes a list of publications for Dr Healy 

Dr David Doyle (doyle.david@ucd.ie) is an IRCHSS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UCD Institute of Criminology and a Research Associate of School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College, Dublin. David read History and Politics at University College Dublin where he graduated with BA and MA degrees, before completing his doctorate at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A previous recipient of an IRCHSS doctoral scholarship, his doctoral thesis, Sexual Crime and the Formulation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935, investigated the incidence and prosecution of reported sexual crime against children in the formative years of the Irish state and provides a critical analysis of the law governing child sexual abuse in twentieth century Ireland. In 2010, David returned to UCD to work on a UCD NACD Study of Drugs and Health in Irish Prisons. Following this, he was employed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College, Dublin, working with Dr Eoin O’Sullivan on “Coercive Confinement in Post-Independence Ireland”. 

David has been recently awarded an IRCHSS Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to conduct research on capital crime and punishment in post-independent Ireland. Working under the mentorship of Professor Ian O’Donnell, this interdisciplinary project will provide a state-by-state analysis of capital punishment in post-partition Ireland, 1922-2001, and investigate whether the progress to abolition in the respective jurisdictions was territorially idiosyncratic or influenced by European values and international human rights law. His other research and teaching interests also include Irish criminal justice history, sexual offences, lethal violence, the death penalty, child protection and coercive confinement. David is also currently in the process of writing a monograph, provisionally entitled Sex Crime and the Irish Child: Parliament, Priests and Prosecutions, 1885-2006.  His most recent publication is 'The "guilty sexual predator" and the "innocent comely maiden" Gender, Paternalism and the Pregnancy Factor', 21 Irish Criminal Law Journal (2011), now available on Westlaw IE.

If you would like to learn more about David’s research, please do not hesitate to get in touch. T: 353 - 1 - 716 8722

Institute Administration

Email: Criminology

T : 353 - 1 - 716 8730