President: Fintan Swanton MSc CEng FICS MBCS CITP

Fintan is a partner in Expense Reduction Ireland, a consultancy specialising in cost management, focussing on cost and overhead analysis, vendor management, and contract negotiation. Previous employers include The Sunday Business Post, AIB, Prudential Europe and Advent Software. He has more than twenty years experience in ICT.

Fintan was elected to Council in 2003. His particular interest is in raising the public profile of the ICS, both to increase acceptance of the Society as the pre-eminent representative body for Irish ICT professionals, and to encourage recruitment of new members.

Vice president: John Ward

Educated in St. Mary’s College, UCD and Trinity College, John has been a member of the society since 1990 and was elected  to the ICS Council in September 2004. John was re-elected to council for a further term in September 2008. He served as Honorary Secretary of the ICS until September 2009 and is currently Vice President of the ICS. He was awarded a fellowship of the ICS in May 2007.

He is an experienced ICT manager with 25 years of experience in the ICT sector, including 20 years at a senior management level. He has extensive hands on experience in the design, development, delivery and implementation of software solutions and services for the financial services, distribution, payments and travel sectors. He also has extensive experience with building & managing multiple leading edge technology infrastructures to support the above.

He is currently a member of the IT Management team of OmniPay, an Irish credit card payment processor where as Authorisation System & Relationship Manager he manages the OmniPay credit card Authorisation Service. John also manages the relationships with OmniPay's key software and communications technology providers and has been with OmniPay since 2002.  Previously John worked in the software sector as Head of Professional Services, Customer Services and Quality Assurance in Allfinanz, a leading Irish financial services (life & pensions) software house.  He was also Technical Director and Software Development Manager with Elstar Computer Systems in the late 80s and early 90s.

John has a particular interest in representing the views of members who are working in the ICT industry and in working to help develop a professional title and quality program of continuous professional development for ICS members.

Honorary Secretary: Peter Lawless

Peter Lawless is a sales and marketing consultant, coach, mentor, trainer and published author. He has a wealth of experience, both nationally and internationally, in growing large and small companies. Peter has led European divisions with Fortune 10 companies as well as growing start-ups to multi-million dollar companies.

Peter has been teaching and coaching people to success since 1984. As a Lecturer, Public Speaker, Sales Manager, Business Consultant and Executive Coach, he has helped thousands of people release their potential. 

Honorary Treasurer: Mike Hinchey

Mike Hinchey is Co-Director of Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, and Professor of Software Engineering at University of Limerick. Prior to joining Lero, Mike was Director of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory and continues to serve as a NASA Expert. Mike holds a B.Sc. in Computer Systems from University of Limerick, a M.Sc. in Computation from University of Oxford and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Cambridge.

The author/editor of several books on various aspects of Software Engineering, at various times Mike previously held positions as Professor in Australia, UK, Sweden and USA. He is currently Chair of the IFIP Technical Assembly and Chair of IFIP Technical Committee 1 (Foundations of Computer Science) as well as Editor-in-Chief of Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering: a NASA Journal (Springer). 

Council Member: Mary Sharp

Mary Sharp is a lecturer in the Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin. She is the deputy convenor of the European body CEN TC251 working group 3 on security and safety in health informatics. Her research interests include data mining applied to medical research, distributed medical information systems, security in health informatics, workflow modelling and the teaching of mathematics through on-line courses.

Mary is also involved in European projects dealing with mathematics, workflow and education using the World Wide Web. She has worked as a consultant to the European Commission as evaluator for many framework proposals. She is a member of the Board of Examiners of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland.

Council Member: Patrick Dillon

Council Member: Declan Brady

Declan Brady has over 17 years experience in the IT industry, in a variety of roles and companies. He is currently serving as Director of IT (EMEA) and CTO for Fujitsu Services in Ireland. His primary focus is in information systems architecture. Declan has previously worked for CFM, Ingres Corp (ASK Group, Computer Associates), Aldiscon Information Ltd (Logica), The Instruction Set Ltd (Hoskyns, Cap Gemini Sogeti) and ICL ITC.

Beyond his day-to-day work, Declan has published a number of papers in the database and object-oriented systems arenas; has collaborated in a book on ANSI standard C (pub. Addison Wesley); lectures in programming, algorithms and data structures to MSc students at Dublin City University. Hi is a member of Addison-Wesley publisher's review panel for Database and Object Oriented systems. His MSc thesis (on the state of the relational model and type systems) has been cited by Chris Date, among others. Declan is a past president of the Irish Computer Society, and represents the Irish IT Industry to CEPIS (Confederation of European Professional Informatics Societies) and IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing). Declan was recently elected Honorary Treasurer for CEPIS.

Council Member: Michael O'Duffy

Micheal O'Duffy is CEO at the Centre for Software Engineering at DCU, where he specialises in the strategic direction of software based organisations. Through the range of training and consulting services at the CSE, he supports the management of software organisations in strategic direction, business planning, innovation and research and development. He has a special interest in agile methodologies. He is an accomplished evaluator, and has carried out due diligence of software organisations, as well as process assessments, product evaluations, project reviews, and technology reviews.

Michael has worked in a wide range of roles in software and IT as a practitioner in the development and deployment of applications across many industry sectors. While he contributes to a number of developmental activities in this revitalisation period in the ICS, his special interest in the ICS is the introduction of professional development services, and the ICS as a pivotal player in the ICT industry and the information society.