Bill Griffin

Bill Griffin was born in 1954 in Clogheen a small village in County Tipperary, Ireland. Just short of his twelfth birthday he left home with a brown suitcase and a vocation to join the De La Salle Christian Brothers. Six years later he returned home with the same suitcase minus the higher calling.

In 1976 he emigrated to Kent in England to undertake mental health nurse training. He went for three years but stayed for twenty three years working in various services in Kent and Yorkshire. He was part of the move of people with intellectual difficulties from large institutions to community based living. He returned to Kent to help close the eleven hundred bed hospital in which he completed his first training.

In 1998 he returned to Ireland with wife Sharon and their three children. They still live in Connemara in Galway. He completed an MSc. at University College Dublin. Bill finished his forty years career as CEO of Galway Simon Community, a charity providing services to people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

Bill has always been a scribbler but retirement has offered him the time to get his writing from the attic to the wider world.

His current bibliography is made up of two Poetry collections, a book of Short Stories, a Collection of shorter memories and three Memoir pieces covering respectively his 6 years in boarding school, his 3 years as a student in Leybourne Grange Hospital and his 6 years as CEO of Galway Simon Community.

The issue of power and powerlessness of groups within society are a recurring theme in his work. His tell it as it is style aims to ensure that the voices of the powerless are clearly heard and the attitudes and actions of those who hold power are exposed. He allows the reader the latitude to make up their own minds with regards to the subjects raised.

Bill is a keen observer of people and finds inspiration from the ordinary and not so ordinary experiences in his life.