Eithne McLaughlin:The social policy theorist and Queen's University professor Eithne McLaughlin, who has died aged 47 after a long illness, had a sense of civic responsibility to match her scholarly achievements.
A particularly public-spirited academic, she interpreted her specialism as demanding involvement on the ground and also at the level of official policymaking. At her death she was a government appointee to the National Economic and Social Council, having also been a steering committee member and assessor for the UK's Economic and Social Research Council.
Her participation in the Commission on Social Justice, set up by the late John Smith in 1992 in his brief leadership of British Labour, gave her a role in early New Labour thinking. Such active involvement was a hallmark of her career.
Appointed aged 35 to a chair of social policy in Queen's University Belfast, their youngest ever female professor, her promotion was as newsworthy in the wider academic world as it was significant for Queen's. Having struggled for some years to redress a pattern of under-representation at senior level of Catholics, and of women, the university was delighted to find in one of its own former students a young woman of McLaughlin's quality.
Born in Omagh, she was one of four children. Her mother worked for the Ulster American Folk Park, her father for the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. She graduated in social anthropology from Queen's and returned to do her PhD there, following a Master's from Trinity College, Cambridge. She then worked as community education officer for the One World Development Centre in Derry for three years before taking up academic positions at the University of Ulster, Queen's and the University of York. In 1984 she married Patrick Clarke. They had three sons, the first of whom died shortly after birth.
As chair of the Social Policy Association and member of the Journal of Social Policy's editorial board, she also became involved in a leadership capacity in the discipline in the UK and Ireland and was a well-known member of the social policy academic community. She served on the social policy panel of the UK-wide Research Assessment Exercise in 2001 and was also a member of the panel for the forthcoming review.
Professor of sociology in Queen's, Mary Daly, points out that Eithne McLaughlin was prominent in UK scholarship at a time when it was difficult for people in Northern Ireland to be recognised as national and international experts. Among the subjects on which she wrote and made important contributions were equality, social justice, poverty and the history of social policy in Northern Ireland. She produced a raft of publications since her doctoral thesis 20 years ago, Maiden City Blues: employment and unemployment in Derry city. Studies undertaken with Queen's sociologists Paddy Hillyard and Mike Tomlinson, funded by the office of the first minister/deputy first minister and the British treasury, have been cited as seminal to the understanding of poverty and social exclusion in the North.
Myrtle Hill, current director of the women's studies programme at Queen's, notes that McLaughlin played a critical role in establishing the Centre for Women's Studies there, and in securing the future of the degree programme. Prof Daly said her contribution as a scholar and an academic was a key to her identity.
McLaughlin's was never a dry, impersonal commitment. While she worked in Derry with the One World Centre, and for some time afterwards, she chaired the Derry/Foyle Women's Aid. Having been part of a review of equality in employment for the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights in 1994-1996, she helped conduct a review eight years later for the Northern Ireland Office on the duty to provide equality as envisaged by the Good Friday agreement. She also served in 2005 as a member of the Equality Commission.
From 2000-2001 she was part of the review body that produced the Burns report on the possible remodelling of post-primary education.
In the following year she served as a member of the O'Hara inquiry into the retention and use of human organs and tissues.
She died in hospital in Belfast and is survived by her husband Pat and sons Matthew and Malachy.
Eithne McLaughlin: born Omagh, Co Tyrone, December 29th, 1959; died Belfast, March 27th, 2007.