The Limerick Spring,
Sharing the Burden

The Limerick Spring is a yearly festival of politics and ideas, with events taking place all across the city of Limerick, Ireland. While the event topics cover a range of issues, I took the opportunity to develop a public discussion on the role of international tax in Ireland, particularly around the idea of companies paying their ‘fair share’.

Much of the preparation I did for this event paralleled ongoing research that I was doing for my post-doc at the University of Limerick, but as a public discussion with a panel of tax experts, it allowed me to develop a forum in forum in which to contrast academic, practitioner and public understandings of these issues. We covered topics from gender discrimination to current tax loopholes and had a discussion that was difficult to end.

TAX MY DIGERIDOO

Accounting is a difficult subject to teach. Students are often not very motivated, and the course materials can be relatively dry. In my introduction to financial accounting course, this was particularly the case for teaching students about value-added tax (VAT).

With help from Guilian PRASEUTH (pedagogical innovation team at TBS) and David KEOUGH (Artist in Residence program at TBS), we produced a short sketch titled: ‘Tax my digeridoo’. Designed to help explain the idea of VAT to students and illustrate how it is accounted for, this video gives students an easy to access learning resource to engage with.

CSEA-Reading Group

Academic research is often a lonely endeavour, especially for researchers in Social and Environmental Accounting (SEA). Conferences and workshops are often seen as yearly ‘lifelines’ to meet likeminded colleagues and discuss new ideas. However, these events often only happen once a year and can be expensive to attend. I started the CSEAReading Group in 2019 to be a relaxed forum in which SEA researchers could meet other colleagues without having to rely on conferences and funding. These sessions were well received, but when the COVID lockdowns happened in 2020, the group became a major outlet for the community to remain in contact. Soon after, the group became affiliated with the CSEAR research network and we’ve been having monthly meeting ever since.