Professor Delia Ferri and Dr. Charles O’Sullivan of the School of Law & Criminology have been awarded funding of over €250,000 from the EU’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme (HORIZON-CL2-2024-TRANSFORMATIONS-01-04). The MU researchers’ work will be conducted as part of an international consortium led by Universitá di Firenze - PIN Arco (Florence, Italy). The whole consortium will receive approximately €3million for the project, entitled ‘Sustainable Wellbeing Through Investment in Social Services’ (SWINS), and will include partners from Belgium, Spain, Italy, Norway, Serbia, Hungary and Germany.
SWINS focuses on the rapid changes that European society has undergone in the past 15 years, and the role that social services as social investment can play in addressing these. It aims to develop a toolbox for ex-ante measurement of the economic and social return on investments in social services, working at both the micro and macro level. Consequently, SWINS seeks to help policymakers determine where to allocate their resources, in order to be sustainable and yield the highest social returns.
The Maynooth team led by Prof. Ferri and Dr. O’Sullivan will conduct a ‘legal mapping’ exercise of all areas EU law relevant to social services, focusing on state aid, competition, and free movement law, and investigate how EU law can support the deployment and delivery of sustainable social services. They will also identify gaps within the EU legal framework, as well as assessing their impact on national legal systems.
Professor Delia Ferri is Professor of Law at the School of Law and Criminology of Maynooth University and Co-Director of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute.
Dr. Charles O’Sullivan is an Assistant Professor in Law and a member of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute.
