Pat Barker

Patricia Barker (born Dublin, June 1949) is an Irish academic, accountant and public body leader. One of the earliest staff at NIHE Dublin, she was later Professor of Accounting there, and then Registrar and Vice-President for Teaching and Learning, after it had become Dublin City University. She served nine years as a delegate to the International Accounting Standards Board. She has also worked as an international election monitor for the OSCE, a human rights observer in Israel and Palestine, and as chairperson of the Irish Blood Transfusion Service and a director of other public bodies. A holder of an MPhil in gender studies and a PhD on financial disclosure, she has written and co-written books and articles on accounting, ethics and gender equality. Early life Born in Dublin in June 1949, Barker grew up, with a brother, in the northern suburb of Clontarf, in a Church of Ireland family. She attended local Catholic schools, Belgrove National School and the Holy Faith convent school, and took a degree in English at Trinity College Dublin. A keen sailor during her school years, she began a career in sailing instruction in Morocco, but then returned to Dublin and with family help joined a firm of accountants there. Career Barker started with Stokes Brothers and Pym (which later merged into what became KPMG) and despite being told that "ladies don't do accounting" took her accountant's articles there in 1973, the 20th woman to qualify in Ireland since chartered accounting began in 1888. She then moved to the UK, working for Harrods. She met her future husband, from Salford in Greater Manchester, on an accounting course in Wales. Engaged by 1972, they settled in Manchester in the mid-1970s, and she both worked in her own practice and with Peat Marwick Mitchell, one of the main firms which merged into KPMG as well as beginning her academic career lecturing there. She returned to Dublin in 1980, and that September became the third of four initial staff of the business school of NIHE Dublin, which was then working out of a few prefabricated buildings; she helped write many of the initial Business Studies course materials, for subjects from Accounting to Management, HR and Law. Over time she rose to be a senior lecturer and then Professor of Accounting, and then Associate Dean of the Business School.