Goretti Horgan

Overview

Goretti Horgan is a Lecturer in social policy at Ulster University, a member of the Institute for Research in Social Sciences and Deputy Director of ARK’s Policy Unit. ARK is a joint Ulster University/Queen’s University, which aims to promote evidence-based policy making and to help researchers, policy-makers and the wider public understand society and politics.

Before joining the University in 2003, Goretti was a Senior Research Officer with the National Children’s Bureau, and then Save the Children. She is also a director and former chair of the Northern Ireland Anti Poverty Network. She researches and writes about child and family poverty, as well as children’s and women’s rights generally.

Most of Goretti’s research is carried out in partnership with NGOs.  She has published reports for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on the impact of poverty on children’s experience of school and (with Marina Monteith) wrote JRF’s Viewpoint on Child Poverty in Northern Ireland. In 2008, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to look at impact of welfare reform on disabled people in Northern Ireland. In 2012, Goretti co-authored with Marina Monteith a Child Rights Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform Proposals for the NI Commissionerfor Children and Young People.

She is currently the Principal Investigator on ESRC funded study "Buying abortion through the internet; exploring the social harm of criminalising abortion in Northern Ireland and the UK." The study hopes to cast new light on existing policy around abortion in the Uk, especially Northern Ireland.