Professor Niamh Hourigan

Prof. Niamh Hourigan is a Sociologist and Vice-President of Academic Affairs at Mary Immaculate College.

As Vice-President of Academic Affairs, she is responsible for managing the academic activity of MIC and maintaining intellectual quality of the institution’s teaching and research. She oversees a range of functions across the College including Student Academic Administration, Student Life, Teaching and Learning as well as Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Interculturalism.

Prof. Hourigan is a member of the Institute of Directors and was a Board member of The Teaching Council (2022-2026), a Board member of the CAO (2019-2023) and a member of the Irish Department of Justice’s Review Group of Civil Legal Aid (2023-2025) chaired by former Chief Justice Frank Clarke. She is currently a member of the Board of Threshold, a national homelessness prevention charity. She has worked with a wide range of public sector and community organisations including the HSE, the Garda Research Unit, the Irish Probation Service, the Simon Community and Barnardos. She served as Co-Chair of the Limerick Food Partnership, the regional umbrella group of food poverty prevention organisations in the Mid-West, for three years.

Prior to her appointment at MIC, Prof. Hourigan served as Head of Department of Sociology and Criminology at University College Cork. She has also held academic appointments at the University of Galway as Course Director of the BA Economic and Social Studies, and at the University of Limerick.

Prof. Hourigan has published research on a wide variety of themes including value change and political culture in Ireland, education transitions in minority cultures, the political sociology of community violence. She has led research projects funded by Irish Aid, Universities Ireland, and the Irish Research Council. Her sole authored books include Rule-breakers: Why ‘being there’ trumps ‘being fair’ in Ireland (Gill and Macmillan, 2015) and Escaping the Global Village: Media, Language

and Protest (Lexington Books, 2003, 2004). She has also edited several texts: Understanding Limerick: Social Exclusion and Change (Cork University Press, 2011), Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies (with Mike Cormack, Multilingual Matters, 2007) and Social Movements and Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2006 with Linda Connolly).

Her PhD, which focused on minority language nationalism, was highly commended under the European Union Committee of the Region’s Doctoral Thesis Prize Competition. In 2010, she co-authored The TEACH Report (Traveller Education and Adults: Crisis, Challenge and Change) with Dr Maria Campbell, which mapped challenges faced by young Mincéirs (Irish Travellers) in the Irish education system. In 2011, she received the UCC CACSSS Special Research Commendation Award for her ethnographic research on organized crime and community violence in Ireland.

Prof. Hourigan has served as editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology and chaired the Editorial Committee of Cork University Press. Having worked as a journalist and radio presenter while completing her PhD, she is a frequent contributor to the Irish media on themes of sociological interest.