Nick O’Brien
Nick was born in Liverpool, where he attended a Jesuit school, St Francis Xavier’s College. He read Classics at Hertford College, Oxford. Having qualified as a solicitor, he pursued a legal career which included posts as Legal Adviser to the Legal Services Ombudsman for England and Wales, Legal Director at the Disability Rights Commission, and Legal Policy and Human Rights Adviser to the UK Parliamentary Ombudsman. He also had a spell as a specialist adviser to two inquiries conducted by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee and was a member of two government taskforces, one on public legal education and one on equality and human rights. He has been an honorary research fellow at Liverpool University and is currently a part-time judge in the mental health tribunal and in the special educational needs and disability tribunal.
For many years, Nick has been a school governor, and for several years chair, at St Mary’s Primary School, Marple Bridge, where his daughter was also a pupil until 2012. He has completed the National School of Formation training for Catholic chairs of governors and headteachers and as part of that programme visited a pioneering, socially active Catholic school in the Philippines, run by Benedictine nuns. He has written occasionally for The Tablet, for the English Dominican journal New Blackfriars, and for Spirituality, a periodical published by the Irish Dominicans.
Nick’s passions have for a long time included travel, especially in India and Italy, cricket, and football. Liverpool FC captain Ron Yeats told him in 1967 that he had ‘footballer’s knees’: sadly, the rest of him never quite made the grade.
