Frances Fitzgerald is Ireland’s first ever Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and has a M.SC in Social Administration and Social Work. She trained as a social worker and family therapist and has worked with inner city communities in London and Dublin and lectured in social work at Trinity College, Dublin.  Elected to the Senate as Fine Gael Spokesperson on Health 2007 – 2011 she was previously a member of the Irish Parliament for Dublin South East Constituency. 

Massimiliano Mascherini is a research manager at Eurofound, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. His main research interests lie in the fields of social cohesion and labour market participation, with great emphasis on young people and the social consequences of their exclusion from the labour market.  Before joining Eurofound he worked as scientific officer at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. He has been visiting fellow at the University of Sydney and at Aalborg University. Over the past few years he has produced in these fields a steady flow of publications in international peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and policy reports.

Frits Tjadens, previously a senior administrator at OECD, Vilans and at NIZW in the Netherlands, studied at Radboud University in Nijmegen. He initiated one of the first quantitative research projects in the Netherlands on family care in 1987, co-edited an international comparative study on support for family carers in 1998 and later co-authored a book on caring for a loved one suffering from dementia. He was project leader on the area of free movement of health professionals and was - as Dutch correspondent – involved in the first SSGI report. He co-wrote the 2010 OECD report on long term care entitled; Help wanted? as well as the 2012 final report of the 25 country EU 7FP endeavour MoHProf, about the mobility of health workers.

Ole Pass is President of the National Association of Social Directors in Denmark, (FSD), representing Danish directors on the Board of ESN. A graduate in Law from the University of Copenhagen he has worked at all levels of government including the Ministry of Social Affairs, as Assistant Director of Social Affairs in the County of Copenhagen and is now Director of Social, Health and Employment Services in the Municipality of Rødovre since 1991. He will join the European Round Table debate in the final plenary session of the conference.