Goretti Horgan is a lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Ulster, a member of the Institute for Research in Social Sciences and Deputy Director of ARK’s Policy Unit. ARK is a joint University of Ulster/Queen’s University, which aims to promote evidence-based policy making and to help researchers, policy-makers and the wider public understand society and politics.

Before joining the University in 2003, Goretti was a Senior Research Officer with the National Children’s Bureau, and then Save the Children. She is also a director and former chair of the Northern Ireland Anti-Poverty Network. She researches and writes about child and family poverty, as well as children’s and women’s rights generally.

She is currently Principal Investigator on ESRC funded study ES/N007409/1 “Buying abortion through the internet: exploring the social harm of criminalising abortion in Northern Ireland and the UK”. The study hopes to cast new light on existing policy around abortion in the UK, especially Northern Ireland. Goretti was the national organiser of the Anti-Amendment Campaign (against the 8th Amendment) 1981-3 and a founder-member in 1997 of Alliance for Choice in Northern Ireland.