Bio

My roots run deep in Tallaght, Dublin. I’m a first-generation university graduate from a working-class family—my father drove buses and my mother worked as a reflexologist, and I grew up as a CODA (child of a deaf adult). Those early experiences instilled in me a profound respect for communication, solidarity, and the struggles of everyday life. From a young age, I was fascinated by politics, economics, and power relations—questions that have guided both my personal choices and academic journey.

I started working at fourteen, selling newspapers and packaging in factories. Over the years I’ve driven forklifts, painted, tiled, laid hardwood floors, picked flowers in a factory, staffed a call centre, and sorted books in a bookshop. Working various jobs taught me firsthand the importance of unions and collective action, and it fuelled my commitment to justice and economic equality.

From 2001 to 2005, I studied Philosophy and Politics at University College Dublin (UCD). As deputy principal of the Students’ Union, I campaigned fiercely for free education and became active in student politics. Those years—surrounded by passionate debate, endless reading, and late-night writing—shaped my political views and convinced me that scholarship and activism go hand in hand.

In 2005, I moved to Amsterdam for a master’s in philosophy, focusing on Habermas and public affairs. Living in that city—cycling everywhere, learning Dutch phrases, and devouring stacks of theory—was magical. I fell in love with bikes, Amsterdam’s openness and its commitment to civic life.

When I returned to Ireland in 2006, I took up a position as Learning Development Officer at the National College of Ireland, where I began teaching evening courses. Yet academia’s pull grew stronger, and in 2008 I won a scholarship for a PhD in Public Policy at UCD. Suddenly I was studying political science and political economy full-time, and my research became inseparable from the unfolding eurozone crisis.

I kept an active blog on the financial turmoil, driven by a conviction that critical scholarly insight should inform public debate. Austerity in Europe was a disaster. I knew this personally and academically. From 2010 to 2012, I spent the tail end of my PhD at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where I fell in love with European politics, languages and deepened my understanding of EU labour markets.

Throughout these years, questions of justice and economic inequality guided me—how do political and economic structures distribute resources, and who wins when capitalism and democracy collide? In 2012, I moved to Florence as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), and taught at James Madison University’s Florence campus. Florence’s art, street life, food, and wine taught me to appreciate life’s aesthetic dimensions, too!

In 2013, I shifted to Cologne as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. There, over many glasses of excellent beer, I explored how institutional arrangements shape inequality across Europe. By 2014, I was back in Dublin as an assistant professor in UCD’s School of Politics and International Relations. I also became Director of UCD’s Dublin European Institute and secured funding to transform it into a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence.

In 2019, I was promoted to Associate Professor. Around that time, I began investigating how law and accounting practices underpin capitalism’s structures. I became especially interested in housing, which I saw as central to wealth inequality. In 2020, I started writing regularly as a columnist for The Business Post, and in 2021 I served as Special Adviser to EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness.

In 2024, I won an ERC Consolidator Grant for a five-year project titled Democracy Challenged: How Corporate Tax Avoidance Fuels the Wealth Inequalities That Undermine Democracy. Building on that momentum, in 2025 I was promoted to Professor of Political Economy at UCD.

I see myself as an empirical social scientist guided by political theory. Big research questions drive my methods, and I thrive on building teams with diverse technical skills. Outside the academy, I strive to be a public intellectual—contributing to Irish and international media to foster citizen engagement and robust societal debate. I value the importance of writing for a non-academic readership.

Today, I live in Wicklow and am the proud father of a wonderful son.. I’ve taken up organic gardening with a passion. I also love my e-cargo bike—it’s my ticket to exploring the world. In addition to leading my ERC project, I’ve just finished a book on climate capitalism. I truly love teaching—right now I’m preparing my module on Capitalism and Democracy for the fall, and I always learn as much from my students as they learn from me.

Football is art. I’m a Boh’s fan. I love literature and music. My ideas flourish best when fuelled by punk, jazz, blues, rock, and reggae.