Ita Mangan (Chair)

Ita Mangan is a Barrister who is currently involved in public inquiries.  She has worked extensively in welfare rights and is now the Chair of the Citizen’s Information Board.   She is a member of the Board of the Irish Hospice Foundation. 

Ita is Chair of the Board of Age & Opportunity and is a member of our Finance, Governance, HR, Quality, Safety and Nominations Committee and a member of our Audit and Risk Committee.

Ita joined the Board in 2011.

Josephine Feehily

Josephine Feehily is a former career civil servant, who held a wide range of positions in the then Department of Social Welfare, the Pensions Board and the Office of the Revenue Commissioners, – the Irish Tax and Customs agency – where she was Chairman from 2008 to 2015. During her Revenue career, Josephine was Chair of the World Customs Organisation for three years, and Chair of the OECD Forum for Tax Administration – a forum of leaders of advanced Tax Authorities.

She established and chaired the first Policing Authority in Ireland and chaired the Pensions Commission 2021.

She was an independent member of the Labour Relations Commission from 2000 to 2006 and contributed to many civil service reform initiatives during her career. Josephine is a graduate of the National College of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. In recognition of her public service career, Josephine was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Limerick in 2016 and a distinguished fellowship by Griffith College in 2019.

Mary Kelly

Mary was formerly a registered nurse and midwife, and was Nursing and Human Resource Co-ordinator, Deputy Director and Director of Nursing at Beaumont Hospital.

She has a Diploma in Management and Human Resource Management from the Institute of Public Administration.

Mary served as a Board member of the Nursing and Midwifery Board (An Bord Altranais) Ireland from 1998 to 2002. She also served as a Board member of the Scoil San Carlos, Confey, Leixlip from 2012 to 2015. She was also a Board member of Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin, from 2011 to 2017.

She is currently on the Board of the Friends of St Brigid’s Hospice and Homecare Service, Curragh, Co. Kildare.

Mary is Age & Opportunity’s Company Secretary and Chair of our Finance, Governance, HR, Quality, Safety and Nominations Committee.

Mary joined the Board in 2010.

Tony McCarthy

Tony McCarthy is a former member of Revenue Commissioners managing several high-profile investigations. He served as National Treasurer of Active Retirement Ireland and as National Competitions Secretary of B.L.E. now Athletics Ireland.

A member of the secretariat of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown P.P.N. he is a physical activity leader with Dun Laoghaire Active Retirement Association, a Fitline mentor and a member of the Age & Opportunity Active Advisory Group.

Tony is also a member of Age & Opportunity’s Audit and Risk Committee.

Tony joined the Board in 2016.

Catherine Marshall

Catherine Marshall is a curator and art historian. She was the founding head of collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (1995-2007) and has curated exhibitions of modern and contemporary Irish and Outsider art throughout Ireland, the USA and China and was guest curator for the Mayo Collaborative’s 1916 commemorative exhibition in 2016.

She has lectured in the History of Art at Trinity College, Dublin, The National College of Art and Design, and University College Dublin and acted as adviser to the Arts Council’s Touring Experiment 2007-9.

She co-edited The Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume V, Twentieth Century, Royal Irish Academy and Yale University Press, 2014. Other publications to which she has contributed include; Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks, RIA, 2016 (co-editor with Eibhear Walsh  and Fintan O’Toole), Irish Women Artists 1800 -2009, Familiar but Unknown (ed. Eimear O’Connor), Dublin 2010,  Making 1918, Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising, eds Lisa Godson and Joanna Bruck, Liverpool, 2015. She was commissioned by the Irish Great Hunger Museum to script a video introduction to the Irish famine and its representation in art and popular culture, University of Quinnipiac, Connecticut, 2015.

She sits on the board of the Irish American Cultural Institute, Common Ground, The Liz Roche Dance Company, the arts advisory committees of the University of Limerick and Maynooth, The South Tipperary Arts Centre, and the management committee of Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent.

Catherine is Chair of the Age & Opportunity Arts Programme Advisory Group.

Catherine joined the Board in 2013.

Peter Smyth

Peter Smyth is a recently retired senior public servant who worked in a number of Government Departments across a range of policy areas including tourism, transport, energy and sport before joining the Irish Sports Council on its establishment as a statutory agency in 1999.

During his 20+ years with the Irish Sports Council (renamed to Sport Ireland in 2015), he was involved in setting up and managing the Council’s corporate and administrative support functions in finance, HR, IT, communications and governance. He spent 10 years as Secretary to the Board before becoming Director of Research, which role he carried out for the last 10 years of his career.

Peter joined the Board in 2021.

John Kerrane

A physical education and sport science graduate, John has extensive experience in sports coaching, administration and teaching.

He was Head of Sport and Recreation in Dublin City University for a number of years. He lead the establishment of the School of Health and Human Performance in the same university, and was a lecturer and member of school and faculty academic management structures.

He has acted as external examiner and quality reviewer in a number of Irish universities (in the Republic and Northern Ireland) and in institutes of technology.
He has been a member of the Student Sport Ireland Research Committee since 2012 and was manager of a major, all-island, research project for that organisation from 2014-2016.
From 2014-2017 he was a member of the CORU (Regulator of Health and Social Care Professionals) Physiotherapy Registration Board and since 2019 has been a Public Interest Reviewer of education and training programmes on behalf of CORU.

He has been a member of the Age & Opportunity Active Advisory Group, since 2013 and acted as Chair of the Age & Opportunity Covid-19 Stakeholder Group in 2020.

John joined the Board in 2021.