Clean Air Advocacy Ireland
About Us
Clean Air Advocacy Ireland (CAAI) is a community of parents, healthcare workers, teachers, students and individuals who care about improving indoor air quality to protect community health and to improve student and patient wellbeing in educational and healthcare settings.
We aim to make essential indoor spaces like creches, schools and hospitals accessible and safe for everyone by advocating for improved indoor air quality.
While we would welcome improvements to indoor air quality in all public buildings, our initial focus is currently on educational and healthcare settings. This is because the most vulnerable in our society, namely children and immunocompromised people, have no choice but to access education, often in overcrowded, unventilated indoor settings or to access healthcare in overcrowded, unventilated medical facilities.
However a lot of the work we are and will be doing will be applicable to workplaces in general. So even if you don’t work in healthcare, childcare or education, sign up for our newsletter and follow us on social media for news and information on how you can clean the air in your workplace.
Meet the Team
Behind everything we do is a team of volunteers who are invested in and passionate about clean air. We are open-minded, collaborative, and ready to make clean indoor air a reality for all.
Sinéad O’Brien
Sinéad O’Brien came to be passionate about indoor air quality thanks to the excellent scientists and science communicators who worked tirelessly in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to educate us all of the airborne nature of viruses, and how improving indoor air quality can play a pivotal role in reducing the spread of airborne pathogens.
This passion and concern for indoor air quality came to the fore when, towards the end of her pregnancy, she was made aware that schools and healthcare settings, including hospitals, were going to abandon mask mandates to prevent the spread of airborne pathogens, without having done necessary upgrades to improve ventilation in the buildings.
It was alarming to realise that newborn infants, the most vulnerable people in our society attending hospital for their health, and children and staff in schools were now going to be exposed to covid and other airborne pathogens without enough being done to reduce the spread.
Sinéad works on an aquaculture farm in the West of Ireland cultivating abalone and several varieties of seaweeds experimentally in a land-based recirculating aquaculture system. Sinéad understands the importance of filtration and UV treatment of the seawater to prevent the spread of disease.
Sinéad believes that children and the most vulnerable in our society deserve to be protected from airborne pathogens to an even greater extent than livestock currently are.
Sinéad co-founded Clean Air Advocacy Ireland (CAAI) with Dr. Ciara Steele after a failed local election campaign where she attempted to highlight the ongoing issue and dangers of the unmitigated spread of SARS-CoV-2 and how indoor air quality can affect the spread of harmful airborne pathogens.
Dr. Ciara Steele
Dr. Ciara Steele is a practicing GP in the North West of Ireland and a mother of teachers and students. She is interested in indoor air quality and its impact on human health, learning performance, and attainment. Dr. Steele is a strong believer that introducing and implementing global standards for indoor air quality will be the sanitation revolution of this generation.