lawyer mediator company director
Brian McLoghlin came to live in Limerick in 1985, and his later voluntary work includes a role in that city. His formal education and legal qualifications were obtained in Dublin at University College Dublin. Limerick lies on the River Shannon in the Mid-West of Ireland, and the city remains the setting of his civic activities.
McLoghlin studied at University College Dublin, an institution with a long history in Irish higher education. It traces its origins to the Catholic University of Ireland, founded by John Henry Newman in 1854 and opened on 3 November that year. The university was re-formed in 1880, chartered in its own right in 1908, and in 1998 was given the name University College Dublin – National University of Ireland, Dublin.
In addition to his legal training, McLoghlin holds a Master of Arts in Economics, and he also received a Master of Laws. His academic qualifications therefore combined economics and law, the two disciplines that later framed his professional work in corporate and commercial matters.
In 2010 he returned to University College Dublin to study for a Diploma in Corporate Governance, a postgraduate qualification concerned with the responsibilities of company boards. He was admitted to the bar in Ireland in 1978. Irish legal training of that period distinguished between barristers, who generally appear as advocates in court, and solicitors, who advise clients and handle transactions and office-based legal work.
McLoghlin began his career as a barrister and later became a solicitor working in-house. His in-house roles included Company Lawyer at Aer Lingus, Ireland's national airline. Aer Lingus was founded by the Irish government in 1936, and its first service linked Dublin with Bristol that same year.
He then spent four years with the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, working in the External Relations and Transport Directorates-General, including the air transport division. Those directorates-general are the Commission's departments responsible for external policy and transport policy respectively.
He subsequently served as Chief Legal Officer and Company Secretary of GPA Group plc, also serving as Group Secretary. GPA, or Guinness Peat Aviation, was established at Shannon, County Clare, in 1975 by Aer Lingus, the Guinness Peat Group and Tony Ryan, and it became the world's largest commercial aircraft lessor in the 1980s. A planned flotation failed in 1992, the company was later broken up, and in 1998 it was renamed AerFi Group.
He worked as a consultant with McCann FitzGerald for ten years up to April 2008, and he was also a partner of the firm. McCann FitzGerald descends from McCann White & FitzGerald, a Dublin solicitors' practice founded in 1947 by a group of partners including Alexis FitzGerald, and it has become one of Ireland's largest law firms.
McLoghlin was accredited as a mediator by the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution, a London-based mediation organisation, in 2005. He has mediated commercial and sporting disputes and is on mediation panels for both fields. As a company director he has chaired boards in insurance, property development, leisure and sport, and the voluntary sector.
Limerick Civic Trust is a voluntary organisation that works to improve Limerick's heritage and environment for residents and visitors. McLoghlin was recently appointed its chairperson, and he has said he wants the trust to play a larger role in the city's future.
The Special Olympics movement organises sporting competition for people with intellectual disabilities. McLoghlin chairs the board of the Special Olympics Europe Foundation, a position that connects his business and governance experience with a voluntary sports organisation.
