Social Care Ireland Annual Conference 2024

Social Care Ireland Annual Conference 2024

Venue: Radisson Blu Hotel, Little Island, Cork

10th & 11th April 2024

Please book your accommodation directly with the hotel

Early bird tickets are now on sale!

The title of this years conference is; Beyond Registration: the challenges of equality, diversity and inclusion for social care workers and the communities they serve. The long-awaited registration for social care workers opens in November 2023. This important juncture provides the opportunity to examine the broader context within which the profession operates, beyond registration. This year’s theme seeks to address the very real challenges of growing inequality in Irish society and the crucial role played by social care workers in bringing about change. Central to this is the lived experience of marginalised and socially excluded groups in society. This conference aims to give a voice to such lived experiences and how these have brought about positive social change. We also recognise the challenges experienced by the social care workforce in an unequal society. To explore this year’s theme we welcome papers/workshop proposals that address innovative practice and give a voice to the lived experience.

The Social Care Ireland Conference Committee welcome abstracts for consideration for research and practice/policy presentations, and workshops at the Social Care Ireland 2024 Annual Conference. The deadline for abstract submissions is 5pm, Friday 8th December 2023. Abstracts, accompanied by a fully completed abstract coversheet, should be submitted to socialcareirelandcon@gmail.com

Call for Abstract Flyer 2024

Keynote speaker: Dr Katriona O Sullivan 

Katriona is a psychologist and memoirist. And a Senior Lecturer in the Assisting Living & Learning Institute, Department of Psychology, Maynooth University. She is the Principal Investigator on the STEM Passport for Inclusion project, featured recently on RTE Changemaker series. She has held research grants from the Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland leading an initiative to tackle digital inequality in education. She also successfully led the largest HEA PATH funded programme entitled Turn to Teaching which focused on diversifying teacher education. She has been invited speaker at the World Education Forum, the European Gender Action Workshop on Women and Digitalization and most recently at the UN gender equality workshop. She has worked with Irish policy makers to develop policies around education and inclusion. She has published research on equality, gender, education, inclusion and STEM. Her first book, Poor, debuted at #1 on the Irish Non-Fiction bestseller list. The book, a memoir of growing up in extreme poverty, describes the far-reaching impact of childhood poverty.

Title of presentation; ‘Surviving Poverty’- Katriona’s talk describes the far-reaching impact that childhood poverty had on her life. As one of 5 children in a home shaped by her parents’ heroin addiction, Katriona’s story chronicles her journey from poverty, teenage pregnancy, homelessness to graduating with a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and becoming an award-winning university lecturer. Katriona’s talk will highlight the educational, social, community systems and supports which rose up to meet her when she looked to change her life.

Keynote speaker: Sez Morse & Edwina Grant

Sez is a Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist and DDP Practitioner, Consultant and Trainer. Sez now works as an independent integrative child and adolescent psychotherapist offering DDP therapy, supervision, consultation, and training. She works with adoptive families, children in residential and foster care and their foster families/keyworkers and birth families. She also provides supervision and consultation to CAMHS teams, Edge of Care teams, other professionals using DDP and those who are hoping to become certified. Sez was a founding director of DDP Connects UK CIC and she sits on several DDPI committees. Sez is passionate about working with youth homelessness and with refugees in her local community. She has been a respite foster carer as well as a birth parent and now enjoys being a (very young) grandparent. Sez lives on the south coast of England with her partner and two sausage dogs and believes she may be part mermaid-part walrus as she likes to swim and bask on rocks in the sun and can’t be far from the sea for long or her fins dry out.

Title of Presentation: What is happening when we sit around the fire telling stories? How working together to develop coherent narratives can open up our hearts and minds, cultivate mutuality and both connect and protect us through intersectionality”

By sharing stories we can go into our dark shadowy unknown, dissociated, shameful or feared places in much less threatening or overwhelming ways – by sharing a universal story that each of us can relate to via the lens through which we see life and others, by telling our own stories and in doing so, each time revisiting and making sense of them anew in relationship with our companions. Once we start to do this and attend to what emerges, we can listen to, accept and be curious and empathic about our young people’s experiences and get alongside them to co-create new meanings and new narratives that serve them better.

Keynote speaker: Senator Eileen Flynn

Senator Eileen Flynn was nominated to the Seanad by Taoiseach Micheál Martin in 2020 and is the first Traveller/Mincéir to the serve in the Houses of the Oireachtas. Her background is in community development and activism on behalf of Irish Travellers and in solidarity with other ethnic minorities. She is also deeply committed to the causes of women’s rights, human rights, and equality. She is a member of the Seanad’s Civil Engagement Group, who are a diverse group of Independents with expertise from across the NGO and civil society sectors.

Title of Presentation: 

More information to follow here is a short YouTube video from the conference in 2022