Dr Mary Tumelty LL.B (2014), PhD (2018) is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, UCC. Mary has research interests in the area of Health Law, Patient Safety, Law of Torts, Law and Emotion, and ADR. She is particularly interested in empirical approaches to health law research.

In 2025, Dr Tumelty was appointed as Deputy Chair of the Health Research Consent Declaration Committee (HRCDC) by the Minister for Health, having served as a member from 2021. She was a member of the Health and Social Care Professionals Council (CORU) (Ireland's multi-profession health regulator) from 2019-2023. Dr Tumelty also currently sits on the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland Research Ethics Committee.

Her work has been funded by the Royal Irish Academy, the Irish Research Council, the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She has also collaborated on projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Most recently, Dr Tumelty was a Co- PI on an RIA-RSE funded project, Regulating for the Workforce of the Future: Addressing the Healthcare Workforce Crisis in Scotland and Ireland (2025) (https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/research/research-projects/regulating-workforce-future).

Dr Tumelty was a visiting scholar at the Mason Institute, University of Edinburgh in 2023, and at the Law, Health and Wellbeing Group, School of Law, Monash University, Melbourne in 2025.

Research Interests

My research interests are mainly in the area of health law. My primary research focus is interdisciplinary in nature, examining the relationship between law, policy, and healthcare practice. Much of my work has focused on civil, criminal, and regulatory responses to medical error, and the impact of these processes from the perspective of the healthcare practitioner and the patient. Beyond this, I have explored related themes such as open disclosure, and the regulation of healthcare professionals, with a view to understanding how governance mechanisms affect safety and trust within healthcare systems. In the context of alternative dispute resolution, my primary research focus is in the area of mediation in healthcare settings. A lot of my work is empirical in nature, allowing me to interrogate the gap between theory and practice.

I welcome PhD proposals from students interested in undertaking a PhD in one of my areas of interest, for example, health law or alternative dispute resolution.

Health Law; Patient Safety; ADR; Empirical Legal Research.

Dr Tumelty has completed advanced training in negotiation and mediation at the Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School. From 2020-2022, she was the principal investigator of Experiential Learning in ADR and Developing Competencies in Dispute Resolution, and has led the development of the ADR curriculum at the School of Law, UCC. These projects were funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Dr Tumelty is interested in approaches to ADR teaching and learning.

Research Grants (as PI)