Background                           

Born in Ireland, I have always yearned to travel and meet people from other cultures. My first solo journey was at the age of 15 to Germany. There I lived with a wonderful family, in a small village outside Frankfurt. It was a total immersion into another country and the foundation of my inter-cultural skills. In 1994 I graduated with a BSc Computer Applications from CIT Cork.

In my third year of college, I started to combine work to travel, completing my 6 months placement at Deutsche Bank Frankfurt. While at college I learnt to scuba dive, fulfilling a dream to explore the underwater world, This continued in my mid-20's, when I headed to Australia. During the 3 years  I lived there, I took a career break from IT to explore a professional career in my passion of scuba diving. It was then I learned to overcome my fear of public speaking, in order to teach the sport I loved. These combined skills of Scuba Diving and German took me to the Maldives for 2 years, working as the Assistant Manager of a Diving School there. Using my travel, skills and passions to create work opportunities.

By early 2000 I settled for a brief period back in Ireland, buying a house and securing a job in IT, Then I jumped into my biggest adventure yet, to India. A country I was terrified to travel to, suddenly grasped me upon landing, a vast, colorful, complex and warm culture. A country that has since become my home and where I have had fantastic opportunities for my own personal growth. Over the last 14 years I have worked as an IT Project Manager, in Business Development,  as a Social Entrepreneur facilitating Social and Cultural projects, now growing into my passion of Executive Coaching.

I am at heart a proud Irish national with a deep understanding of the Indian subcontinent, its collective psyche and its quirky working mechanisms. This has been extracted, at times painfully, from having immersed myself fully within India. My life and work here has moved between the various levels, most of which short term residents are not exposed to. This allows me to decode on a functional level how things work in the real India. The truth to this has been validated by the results I have seen working with organisations as varied as ground level NGOs to Diplomatic missions.
 
My passion for inter-cultural relations went into the Cultural projects between Ireland and India.  I have been so lucky to have worked with incredible artists from both countries, these projects are close to my heart because I understand how difficult the life of an artist can be, and also how important their work is, especially when looking at building relations between countries who are otherwise so different, we can communicate through art music and film together. The relations I have made in this area are still ongoing and will do for many years to come.