Donal Mc Cormack

Donal Mc Cormack is the Conference secretary and is on the organising committee. He is the former national director of children’s residential services in Tusla Child & Family Agency with over 30 years of residential childcare experience as a practitioner and manager. He has worked in community child care, in patient child psychiatry, youth detention, Mainstream residential and managed the very first special care centre for children detained on welfare grounds (1995-2000). Over 15 of his 30+ years were at senior operational management level in public childcare service delivery. He was responsible for the operational management of Tusla’s children’s residential services. The breadth of his former role includes managing a budget of €164m and a team of over 1,000 caring for approximately 600 young people across the statutory, voluntary and private sectors.

One of his many achievements was the setting up of the Way2Work apprentice and job seeker programme (in 2018) which collaborates with private industry in securing job and apprenticeship opportunities for young people in care and after care. He lectures part time on the Masters programme in professional management of complex behaviour (PMCB) in Dundalk Institute of Technology. Donal has been in a training role over 20 years teaching C.P.I., T.C.I, PMAV and more recently PMCB, to a range of health and social care professionals.