Social Work Spotlight - International Episode 21: Paul (Ireland)

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

In this episode I speak with Paul, who has over 45 years experience managing child welfare and protection services in the statutory sector at local, regional and national level in Ireland. He currently operates as an independent consultant, specialising in serious case reviews, expert witness and policy development for state bodies and voluntary organisations.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Paul’s podcast ‘Life After Stalin - A Dubliner’s Diary’ - https://open.spotify.com/show/6kbfVumc19v9FgseoL17oC?si=771ba39bec374a22Abstract for Paul’s article, ‘No Smoke Without Fire: The Presumption of Guilt in Child Abuse Assessments’ - https://www.nagalro.com/_userfiles/pages/files/paul_harrison_no_smoke_without_fire_article_g.pdfDaughters of Charity Child and Family Service - https://www.docchildandfamily.ie/Dublin Simon Community - https://www.dubsimon.ie/Paul’s memoir, ‘Hanged If You Do…: Reflections from a Career in Child Protection’ - https://www.orpenpress.com/books/hanged-if-you-do-reflections-from-a-career-in-child-protection/This episode's transcript can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12DE2NhpOm7bMi0KS1OJHhABB_cCEuIGWRa4sJbRi4Uw/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Before beginning, I wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of the countries of guests featured in this podcast and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, waters and community. I pay my respects to the First Nations people, the cultures and the elders, past, present and emerging. Hi, and welcome to Social Work Spotlight, where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode, with a 12-month focus on social workers around the world as of August 2025. I'm your host, Yasmin Lupus, and today's guest is Paul, who has over 45 years experience managing child welfare and protection services in the statutory sector at local, regional, and national level in Ireland. He currently operates as an independent consultant, specialising in serious case reviews, expert witness and policy development for state bodies and voluntary organisations.

Thank you, Paul, for joining me this morning on the podcast, looking forward. to having a chat with you about your social work experience in Ireland and UK. Yeah, pleased to join you, yeah. I'd love to know firstly when you got started in social work, what brought you to the profession? Well, it was many moons ago. When I left school in the early 70s, I actually went into the advertising industry for a couple of years. I was a copywriter, and the way it came about was

I volunteered in a night shelter for homeless people run by the assignment community here in Dublin. So I did one night a week in that. And it led me after about a year or so to take up a full-time job in the administration in the assignment community, which I did for another couple of years. And I got the bug then and applied for social work training and kind of segued into it that way. An unusual jump. Well, I mean, it's not so much unusual. I guess it kind of makes sense. I always wish I'd started volunteering. earlier and getting experience before studying or at least before graduating. I'm wondering what led you down the path of volunteering in the first place.

Is that something that perhaps was instilled in you early? Is that something that you placed a lot of value around? No, it was just from observation as a 21-year-old as I was at the time. There was a lot of in Dublin, a lot of street drinkers. And I suppose what we used to refer to at the time as winos and tramps, you know, all the old-fashioned language, but there were a lot of street drinkers and homeless people that it's very hard not to have compassion for that, a very rough life, you know. So it led me to make those inquiries and a lot of other young people do. You know, they'd come in and come out

after a few months, you know. The night shelter where I worked was largely run by young volunteers like that, you know, very rough conditions. But that was the main thing really, just literally, seeing people on the street and said, we should try and do something about it. When I went into the office, I had no intention of going in full time, but I decided when the job came up that I was perfectly capable of changing the world within a year or so. So with idealism of youth, I went in, but I got the bug then, as I say, I went on to formal training. Yeah.

Have you had a chance to use any of those earlier qualifications in what you've done throughout the years? in terms of my advertising career and that. Well, I've always had an interest in writing and I do write and I now describe myself as an author as well as a consultant. So I've written a couple of work-related books, a memoir and I'm recording a podcast at the moment, a second series, which is more to do with personal essay, you know. So I've come back to it in later life, as it were, you know. Lovely. And what were your early social work days, even maybe from the practical sections that you had to do at university and how did that form what you wanted to do early on?

Well, my entire career postgrad is in the area of child welfare and protection, you know. But I trained in Belfast in the mid-70s and I still valued the placements. I had that. In fact, one of my placement teachers is still a friend of mine, 45 plus years later. Yeah. And that particular one was in a psychiatric setting. I picked up some fantastic skills there in terms of history taking and in the broad sense diagnosis, but trying to assess what's in front of you.

But history taking in particular and the detail that was done is something that stood to me throughout my career really. It was instilled into me at that early stage, you know, to be precise and to be detailed and I certainly valued that. But you decided to go more into sort of the child and family, welfare rather than mental health side of things? Initially, I was doing both. I joined a psychiatric team here down in Dublin, but I was a member of the social work

team. So child protection issues arising from psychiatric patients presenting was my specialist as I were, you know. So I kind of bridged both for a couple of years. So I was a dual member of the psychiatric team and the social work team at the same time. and then I went full-time into, left the psychiatric bit behind, and I went full-time into the childcare side of it. Okay.

That would have been an incredible experience as an early career social worker to get the breadth of both teams and both approaches to how they work. And I imagine you got a lot of homelessness population as well, which ties back to the earlier volunteer work. Yeah, there were a lot, yeah, although, you know, it was run quite a lot on bureaucratic lines. So like catchment areas counted. So the truly homeless were probably out of the net for a large extent, you know.

And I think nowadays there are more specialist services, both medical and psychiatric, to follow people who don't comply with bureaucratic catchment areas, you know, to ensure that they get a service too. But it was a great experience. Yeah. And there was some great psychiatrists. Again, like my placements in Pelfast, that, you know, as a young person starting off, They were very supportive and had a real influence, a formative influence on my future career, really, you know,

I still look back with great admiration on them, you know. That's wonderful. Do you think maybe you don't know too much if you've been removed from the sector somewhat, but do you think the role of social work in those homelessness and mental health populations has changed over time? It has changed, all right, in that it has a higher profile, you know. and the whole issue of safeguarding of adults. There is more policy and procedure around that, not so much legislation,

but there is national policy for people to protect vulnerable adults as well as vulnerable children. And social work is the place where that gap is filled, you know. And the Health Service Executive, which is the provider of the vast majority, while all public health care in this country has recently appointed, the chief social worker. So that you can see that that's a step forward, you know, where at the highest level there's somebody looking after the provision of social work throughout the whole spectrum of medical services. Yeah. So that's a good development. That's lovely. Yeah. Given that you worked in,

and I imagine worked in a multidisciplinary team, you would have had occupational therapists and nurses and all sorts of allied health professionals. Why do you think that safeguarding and some of those responsibilities were falling on social work or why do you think those were social work roles per se? I think it goes back to the elements of training that the various disciplines get. I mean, when I was in the psychiatric service as well as psychiatrists, we had psychiatric nurses and I learned an awful lot from them as well, you know, and I suppose that they're more focused on the therapeutic side and obviously they know stuff on medication and stuff, which I would have no experience of. Whereas I think on family dynamics and overall welfare and protection,

I mean, they look to us and I suppose that is part of the foundation of our training. You know, it kind of fits. Yeah. So I think over time, as you suggested in Australia as well, the benefits of social work in that team environment in terms of ability for safeguarding. And we would probably call it more guardianship or financial management for people who have either a temporary or a permanent loss of ability or capacity to be making decisions for themselves and very much making sure that these vulnerable people are protected in some way or very much have their dignity and rights upheld as opposed to an assumption of incapacity. So yeah, totally on board with all of that.

How did you then get to where you are now? Because I'm sure that there are lots of steps in between. Well, remained in the statutory sector, which has had various incarnations. It has changed, but it's one, the Health Service Executive covers everything now. There were various iterations of that throughout the years, but I remained in the statutory sector and basically worked my way through it from a practitioner to local manager, to regional manager, to national manager, which is what I left. In 2011, the government made a decision to separate out child protection and welfare from the health services, where it was very much, I suppose, the junior partner, you know.

Obviously, if you compare the provision of general hospitals in Ireland to provision of child protection, you can see why. But there was a lot of heat on child protection through the media and political systems. And the government took a decision that they would set up a separate agency. and they also appointed a cabinet minister for children, which was fantastic. That was a big step forward. So Francis Fitzgerald was appointed the first minister for children at that time. And coincidentally, I think, she was a social worker. She started out life as a psychiatric social worker, actually.

So she knew well what she was dealing with. And in 2014, that new state agency, the child and family agency was established. And I was on its management team. We had a couple of years run in. So it took us a couple of years to build it up and go live. So we were in shadow form for a couple of years until we got everybody on the structure and the people in place. So it's a standalone agency since the 1st of January 2014, Thusla, the Child and Family Agency. How exciting to be part of a newly developed agency as well from sort of the point of conceptualisation through to getting it up and running because that would have been a very dynamic and shifting environment where you have to, I guess, be able to demonstrate or articulate to the powers that be what's happening at every stage.

Yeah, it was a once in a career opportunity, you know, like I can't remember how many were on the national team. I think about seven of us to set up at this new agency and to be given carte blanche to do things differently I guess you know and what we tried to focus most on was to have a very lean apex to the organization and put all the business stuff that the people knocking on the doors are the people that do the real work and we were trying to keep the resources down at that level you know and keep the chain of command as tight as possible between the top of the organisation and the bottom, you know. So that all worked for a while anyway. I left a couple of years later. I retired early in 2015 and I've been on my own since, but it was, yeah, it was a super opportunity and a great way to end a long career. Yeah, well,

what a legacy to leave. And I imagine built into formulation of the agency was evaluation in terms of the structure and outcomes, at what stage was that carried out? And did you get to see what the outcomes were? Yeah, well, I suppose it's largely on a rolling basis, you know, and there was a lot of political interest as well. So in the first instance, I mean, just at the establishment on what it was going to look like and precisely what it would do, because it wasn't just social work within the health service that was peeled off.

It also took in an older organisation that was involved with school welfare and attendance and a couple of other areas. So it was an amalgamation of a number of services to make a broader child protection and welfare agency. So we had obviously a strategy and strict objectives. So, I mean, they were reviewed very closely by the department. And the minister was very, very hands-on in those early days. And I well remember we used to go in every month. And you needed to have your homework done because having been a social worker, there was nowhere to hide. She knew if you were massaging the statistics and you needed to have your homework done.

And how did you then make that decision to step away? And it sounds like, yes, you may have retired from that, but you're still very much active. Yeah, I am. Yeah, well, I was involved in the setup. It moved along. I had a couple of years and it was either a case of keep going on till retirement age or leave a bit early and look at other opportunities, you know. I felt I had done the heavy lifting and just have a look at what the big wide world looked like on its own. I didn't have a huge plan, you know. I didn't have a strategy in terms of exactly what work I would do. But it came to me and it's still coming and it's coming. And it's coming. in volumes that I prefer it wasn't, but I do swear that I will do a little less every year, you know, at the older I get. My wife says that I didn't actually retire. I just changed jobs, you know. There's a certain truth than that. How did you get started? Did you have existing networks? Did you go straight into consulting? How did that work? I went straight into consulting,

but before I left, I had people asking me to do a couple of serious case. reviews, this sort of work, you know, and to a large extent that's still what I do now, serious case reviews. I do a lot of work for the Child and Family Agency, actually, you know, but also related organizations, mainly voluntary, you know. I deal with complaints as well and obviously give expert advice if I'm asked for it, you know, as well. So that's the kind of area I live in. It's a piece of cake reviewing people's work rather than having to do it because you have the benefit of hindsight and I know well what it's like not to have it and to be feeling your way along into the future, you know. So I do empathise a lot with the people and

hopefully I can give them reasonably just feedback when I'm finished. Yeah. Do you have the opportunity to do any training or workshops? I'm imagining a lot of what comes up while you're reviewing are a lot of consistencies that you can see in practice in the way that agencies are operating and maybe then you can kind of reach a wider audience. I stay away from training myself because I think I'm no good at it, but I'm making recommendations. Unfortunately, a lot of the structure of the reviews I do will ask for, it's not a punitive system that they will ask for learning recommendations as well. so I would put in where I think the gaps are, you know.

The current B in my bonnet is social workers can tend to leap to conclusions, and particularly in the area of child protection. It's understandably social work, I suppose. The default is to look after the victim, but in the context of child abuse, the perpetrator or the alleged perpetrator has rights, and they've rights to fair procedures and natural justice. And I'm killed trying to tell social workers not to jump to con. conclusions, but to find the evidence, you know. In fact, I recently wrote an article for an English

journal. It's called No Smoke Without Fire, the presumption of guilt in child protection assessments, you know, because I think that that happens too often that people jump to conclusions without giving the alleged perpetrator a fair crack of the whip, you know. And in Australia, there are services for people who have perpetrated violence. Is there something similar? Are people still afforded support? Often they're the ones who need quite a lot of support in terms of not continuing to perpetrate? There is and there's a newly established state agency to deal with domestic violence, you know. My only gripe with that is that it has taken a kind of a justice stance. It's under the Department of Justice. So being there, it's not too interested

in whole family or therapeutic solutions to the issue of domestic violence, you know. I'm involved, for example, in a voluntary organisation that does work in that area and we're stuck out on a limb really because it doesn't fit under the new justice model, you know, which is to do with obviously looking after the victim. But there's little interest in that model in a therapeutic intervention to make things better. It's more to do with crime and punishment, you know. Yeah. And what are you finding in terms of social work in that realm? Do you think similar to the mental health progression of the profession, do you think that social work is being better understood or better recognized or better

respected? Is there a real sort of strong role or is it very much stuck back in, I'm thinking in terms of child protection and family support, at least there's a legacy in Australia of removal of children, of a lot of sort of power and punishment, that sort of thing from a top down perspective as opposed to working with families? Well, certainly still within the area of child protection and domestic violence features a lot, you know, and that's probably underestimated by social work to a large extent, you know, but you will see when you look at either individual case reviews or through statistical analysis, you know, that domestic abuse features greatly, or at least is a large element in a lot of the cases, you know. It may come in as a suspected sexual abuse case, which it may well be, but there is a also the whole issue of the dynamic of domestic violence within it, you know, that also needs to be addressed. Yeah. Do you find that you get capacity to influence policy or have sort of a way

in terms of how there's an evolution of practice of social work, given that you've kind of been able to see things over a period of time and at different levels? How do you feel that you can influence the practice? Yeah, I mean, I suppose through my review work, I have that. I mean, this stage, I mean, it's what I do. I try and get practitioners to reflect back on what they're doing, you know, as I say, when those opportunities to present people with learning opportunities, you know, and things on what they might do better, I provide that. I've been at it for over 45 years now, so I suppose I feel entitled to be some sort of a grumpy old mentor or whatever, you know, and be able to give some honest feedback, you know, to current practitioners and

how things might have been, you know. And, I'm just a good. And I'm just a little bit of, you know, I've seen all the iterations of how things have been done, you know, still look ahead at how things might have been done better, you know. So I suppose by default, then, that gives you a kind of a mentoring role, you know, where people would tolerate a little bit of feedback that maybe they wouldn't take from other people, you know, if it's done in a collegial way, you know, rather than blaming people. Yeah. Are you still a member of some boards or sort of high up in some of the agencies in terms of that consult?

When I left the Child and Family Agency, I joined the State Agency, the Adoption Authority of Ireland. I served on that for 10 years, but my tenure ended in November last year, and you can only do two terms of five years. So that was a fantastic experience. I'm on the Board of Management of a voluntary organisation that works in the Greater Dublin area called the Daughters of Charity Child and Family Agency. They're a religious order that have a tremendous track record going back about 150 years in terms of serving vulnerable communities. They have a fantastic mission. So I'm pleased to be associated with them because they're innovative and they direct their services at those who need it most, which a lot of voluntary organizations don't.

Yeah, that's really fulfilling. You don't have time, I guess, but as you start to scale back from the formal work, do you hope to pick up? more volunteer work? No, I'm fairly heavily involved with the daughters of charity and it's enough to keep me going when I stopped. Also, the 10 years on the Adoption Authority of Ireland was very demanding. There's a lot of stuff to read, a lot of meetings and a lot of big decisions to make around adoption and policy and practice in that area with the agency who actually make the orders for children to be adopted. So the power and the authority rests in the board. So there was seven of us making those orders, you know. It was very fulfilling as well. So once a month was

so-called orders day when children would come in at the end of the whole process and become adopted. It was, you know, a moving and joyful experience, you know, that over the 10 years I can honestly say I never got tired of, you know. But having stopped, I'm not looking for anything else in that area, you know. I'm trying to convince myself that I'm at the least semi-retirement. tired. That's perfectly reasonable. Was there anything else that came up while you were working or even studying in terms of different areas of social work that you thought, oh, if I had my time again, I'd like to give that a try? In terms of other areas, not really. I mean, what interests me, I suppose, going back, when we started first, I suppose we were looking across the water to England,

mainly in terms of how the structures were and what the emphasis was. And non-accidental injury, as it was called, was very much to the fore in the mid to late 70s. And there were some notorious cases there. So we became state agents seeking out that. And it was quite a punitive service, you know. It had quite a pleasing feel to it, you know. And we would very much often go into families and say, well, you're doing a very bad job here. and if you don't get better, we're going to take your kids off you, you know.

That softened up over the years then and we realized, well, maybe if we actually helped them, things might improve. So we took more of an approach towards family support instead of, as is where, park in the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We drove up to the top and tried to do some earlier intervention. And going back to the daughters of charity, that's precisely what they were doing as well. And that's why I'm pleased to still be. associated with them, you know. So that emphasis shifted. Now in more recent times, things have

changed population, mice and everything and there's huge issues around addiction and elsewhere and the child protection services are inundated and that's resulting in much less family support work being done, you know. So I continue to advocate that if we only provide child protection services, that's all we're going to get, you know, and the whole preventative area goes out the window, you know. Going back into the mid-90s, I was fortunate enough to be a director of a regional services in the greater Dublin area, and new legislation had come in, and there was a lot of money came with the new legislation, the Child Care Act 1991, which was enacted a few years later.

In some of the heavier areas in Dublin, we doubled the amount of social, workers, but we suddenly realized that what we got for that was twice the amount of child protection cases, you know. So the lesson I learned then was if we don't balance that out with more supportive services, we will just continue to go down that slippery slope of generating more and more work without trying to actually do some remedial work and lobby on the hard end. So I suppose I still advocate that we need a much more balanced approach. And even with the child and family agency at the moment, the vast majority of its employees or social workers, obviously.

But the role of childcare workers, which is a recently registered profession over here, have a massive role to play and could be playing a much bigger part in the community. At the moment, it's confined to largely residential care. There are some in the community, but not enough. And also possibly even unqualified family support workers. They could be doing a lot more to bolster up the work, you know, rather than let it become more and more acute. And the threshold for intervention is getting higher and higher, you know.

And I see that with the Child and Family Agency. A case has to be completely on fire now before it can get through the front door, you know. And I just think that's unfortunate, you know, that there isn't an opportunity to have a more balanced approach. So it's almost as a response to we have far too many people to look after in too many cases as being to raise the threshold so that those cases aren't identified. Yeah, that's it, yeah. I've seen it in the dental service where there were massive waiting lists and then a new dentist

came in and suddenly there was no waiting list. And of course, the solution wasn't a better treatment outcome. It was a higher threshold, you know. That doesn't actually help people. It might help the service provider. Well, yeah, exactly, rather than actually fixing the original issues. Yeah, yeah. Just in the area of family support,

in the early 2000s we drew on your near neighbours in New Zealand for the Family Welfare Conferencing model. We established links there and took some training, actually, from the chief social worker that was there at the time. and introduced a family welfare conferencing system within the country, you know, which was quite beneficial at the time. Because they have quite a well-defined system of kinship care traditionally, so that makes sense. They do, yeah, they do.

And we copied it to a large extent. But the one mistake I think the government made was that they insisted that family became formal carers, whereas under the New Zealand model, if say an aunt was looking after a child on behalf of a vulnerable family, the child wouldn't necessarily have to be received into state care to get resources and to help that child. Whereas we adopted the situation where they had to be received into state care to come under that kinship model, you know, which is a bit of a shame. So in effect, children were being received into state care to enable families who are caring for them

to receive benefits, you know, including. financial benefit. That's not a reason to take a child into care. Absolutely. You're working for yourself now. You don't have wraparound support of a team that you can kind of turn to and just talk about a specific case. What support do you need at this stage in your career? Well, at this stage, I mean, I have colleagues that have been with me on the road for many years, you know, and so if I have a difficulty or a dilemma or I need to sound somebody, I will phone somebody up or meet them, discuss cases. That would be my primary source of support, you know.

It's an informal network and I would do the same to somebody else. At this stage, you know, my network is large enough to be able to draw on that from, you know, to phone somebody with any particular issue, you know, that works well. But I stay in touch with the literature. and, you know, learning events. I'm a member of the Irish Association of Social Workers and Ipsgam. And over in the UK, there's an organization called the Galero, which represents guardians of Lietam and independent social workers.

And I'm linked with them. It was for them, I wrote the article on the one I called No Smoke Without Fire. They published that. You know, so that's a fairly healthy network that I can draw on. That's great. You've talked about a lot of the challenges that have come up through the course of your work. What are the most rewarding or what are your favourite parts of the work or social work in general? Well, looking back on my entire career, I mean, it's individual cases you remember the most, you know,

and particularly when there's a good outcome. I used to always love and it didn't happen too often. Somebody whom I might have placed in care years or decades before that would ring up and say, I just ringing up to say thanks, that was pretty helpful, you know, and I had a good time of foster care, whatever was. That's, you know, that's certainly the warm glow. I suppose the satisfaction I get now is more on the mentoring side where I have the opportunity and I suppose the privilege and a way to be able to say to current practitioners, I wouldn't be doing that if I were you, you know. And so that kind of informal mentoring, I suppose, is something I get some satisfaction out of now. Yeah. Are there any programs or projects that you're a part of that we haven't had a chance to speak about or anything that's coming up for you?

I don't think so. I mean, the project I'm most involved at the moment is not social work related. It's just a podcast I'm doing, which involves personal essay. I did a series for local radio and it's up on Apple and Spotify. And as they say, wherever you get your podcasts, I have done that. And I'm currently recording a second series. So that's preoccupying me at the moment, you know. But it's nice. And that's looking at life in general as opposed to social work. You know, and sharp focus. But I still contributed, as I say, I wrote a memoir about my experience in social work a couple of years ago. It's called Hanged If You Do. A great title. Yeah, there was a colleague of mine used to have a slide that she used to show, and it was somebody been hanged, but it was a matchstick man, and she'd show the first slide, it was, this is a social worker who didn't take a child into care, and then she'd flick on and say, and this is a social worker who did take a child into care. It was the same slide, you know, so that was the hanged if you do. And that's why it stuck in my mind. So they're the kind of projects that I'm working on at the moment.

When I'm finished this podcast, I'm probably going at writing another book again, which will not be social work related, you know, so maybe I'm going back to my roots. Maybe that's a nice way of phasing out as well for you mentally and professionally of, you know, kind of building in elements of social work in your life as a social worker, but giving yourself a bit of space from the profession. Yeah, I think so, yeah. And, you know, it's nice to have another interest, you know, and I'm just trying to get that balance, right.

I think over the last few years, I just, I was doing too much. And I don't work full time. I try not to do social work in the afternoon. I work most mornings. It doesn't always work out. certainly isn't working out this week. But that's the way I kind of divided my life. But as each year goes by, I try and do a little less social work

and a little more, something else, you know. Yeah. But I'd be 50 years qualified the year after next. Wow. Maybe I might even stop. That's incredible. And just such a wealth of knowledge that you've built in that time and being able to provide that to the next generations

and be able to communicate that through the work that you're doing. It would be hard to step away from, but I think you've kind of got the right idea in terms of gradually stepping back and giving yourself some breathing room and thinking, am I happy with this amount? Am I still doing too much? I think if you stop, start very suddenly, you can probably feel as though, I don't know if I've made the right choice, whereas you're really giving yourself the opportunity to reflect on it. That's right. I think just, you know, as somebody was saying that before, you don't have to stop, you just have to slow down a bit, you know, and I have to, and I have this year now I have refused work which I always found hard to do I'm always so

complimented when somebody phones me up and asks me to do something I always oh certainly but now I kind of I say maybe I'm getting a bit of sense I say well I could start that at the end of May if that still works for you you know and not just inundate myself with work which I have been doing I have a colleague or a friend I know he's a former judge who's 83 now and he was saying recently, I'll have to slow down. So I really admire his energy, you know. Yeah.

And I think that's the social worker in us, the people pleasing side of saying, yes, I'll do the thing and then having to figure out how it's going to work a bit later. So you're developing that skill of saying or stepping back before you give a response and then deciding whether it's A, something you can do and B, when you can do it.

That's really sensible. I think that's true, yeah. I think you're right, yeah, but the psyche of the social worker are the people who go into social work, yeah, we're kind of born rescuers, you know, and maybe leap before we think, you know. Yeah. I just found this really incredible in terms of you've been able to show us from the starts of volunteering at the homeless shelter and how that got you into thinking about social work as a profession and then your teams in psychiatric health and the child and family work and how that gave you a really good indication as to what you might like to do further on in your career

and working through the ranks and all those changes in government that you had the privilege, I guess, of seeing as well as being able to be part of the change. But the consultancy work has been a gradual shift for you of moving away from that formal nine to five, this is what I'm doing as a profession towards more. I have this experience and wealth of knowledge and I want to be able to constructively take that down a slightly different path. And I think the board work has been helpful with that as well. And now some more volunteering and moving into a bit more of a slightly different media type development of the podcast and the authorship. But you're remaining connected to those peers for support,

which I think is really healthy for social workers in general, but anyone who's thinking of stepping back from something and wanting to resist the isolation that can come with that, because I think if you've spent your whole life deriving worth from the things that you're doing and those things are not necessarily as actively visible, that can be really difficult. So, yeah, I've been so thrilled to hear that perspective and also just seeing how that's taken you through the Irish context and the similarities between Australia and what you do. But I don't know if there's anything that maybe I haven't asked or anything else that you wanted to mention before we finish up.

No, nothing else occurs to me. I think we've covered a lot. I've dipped in and out of your podcast. It's very interesting to hear the other nations, you know, and how they're structured on what they do, you know. It's been a very worthwhile project you've engaged in. Thank you. And as I was saying to you earlier, this gives me energy.

It's just so wonderful that people can share what they're doing and show, yes, there are differences, but there are so many similarities. and that's what we keep coming back to is that foundation of our teaching and our interest in supporting people and where that takes us across the world is fascinating. So I'm glad you can be part of this little project and very grateful to you for your time. Delighted to be asked, yeah. Thanks for joining me this week. If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Paul,

please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm. slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Blue Sky, or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. Next episode's guest is a manual, an early career social work researcher from Nigeria at the intersection of migration and mental health

with a bachelor's degree in social work and a master's degree in migration and a strong interest in research. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you're notified when this next episode is available. See you then.