Tony Geoghegan awarded 2024 Irish Red Cross Lifetime Achievement Award

Tony Geoghegan, one of Ireland’s leading advocates for the homeless and those suffering from drug addiction, has been awarded the 2024 Irish Red Cross Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award is timely as the Irish Red Cross are calling for more compassion and a kinder society especially for those who have fallen on hard times. T

here has never been a greater need for citizens and community groups to reach out with an ever increasingly challenging world where even the smallest good deed matters and this is what the Irish Red Cross hopes to encourage more of with their annual Humanitarian Awards.

Tony Geoghegan has worked in the addiction arena for the past thirty years, both in Ireland and in Britain.

He was CEO, and cofounder, of Merchants Quay Ireland, Drugs and Homeless Services for 28 years.

He founded the Merchants Quay Project alongside Fr Sean Cassin in 1989 as a response to the growing issues of problem drug use and homelessness in Ireland.

It later became Merchants Quay Ireland in 2001 and now employs more than 200 staff, providing services across Ireland.

He has worked across a range of different treatment modalities and settings from crisis intervention, including needle exchange, to day counselling services and on to residential drug free therapeutic communities and aftercare and resettlement programmes.

He is an accredited addiction counsellor and clinical supervisor and is a former Chairman of the A.C. I. (Addiction Counsellors of Ireland).

He is currently the Irish representative on the Council of Europe’s, Pompidou Group’s Expert Group on Drug Policies and Human Rights: self-assessment tool.