At the moment my normal day is quite abnormal! I have a very specific brief, and most days of the year I'm concentrating on that, but I represent the St Vincent de Paul at the negotiations on a new national agreement which are taking place at quite an intense level right now, so my day is taken up with that.

I have three key objectives which I usually focus on. Firstly, I facilitate the members to pursue social justice in their work; in other words, I facilitate them to communicate social-injustice issues they see on the ground - which could be in relation, say, to medical cards or social-welfare payments.

I also help members indicate the most effective way to bring about change. My main communication with members is through the social-policy committees we've set up around the country.

The third strand of my job is to represent the St Vincent de Paul at the talks on a new wage deal, which is part of the negotiations on a new national agreement.

Our campaigns take different forms. We are currently involved in a joint campaign called the "Open Your Eyes to Child Poverty Initiative". It is an 18-month campaign we're doing in conjunction with Barnardo's, Combat Poverty, the Children's Rights Alliance and the National Youth Council of Ireland. We are aiming the campaign at middle-income earners throughout the country. Our first initiative was a supplement on child poverty in the Saturday edition of the Irish Independent last June.

The second initiative was in September. The day the children went back to school, we issued press releases on going back to school for low-income earners - something for journalists to tag on to the usual news items which show little four-year-olds going to school for the first time. It worked very well - we got a lot of coverage. In the longer term, it also seemed to work: this Budget saw a 50 per cent increase in the back-to-school clothing and footwear allowance. The day the Junior Cert results came out, we issued press releases on early school-leavers and educational disadvantage. Again, that got pretty comprehensive coverage.

Individually, each organisation within that child-poverty initiative is also pursuing its own strategies, which we liase with one another on. For example, I was on Prime Time last week as a spokesperson for St Vincent de Paul, talking about child poverty.

This campaign is totally issue-based - it's not about fundraising. But by the time I got back to the hospitality room after doing Prime Time, a viewer had phoned in making a suggestion about raising money. Anything that raises the profile of an organisation will impact on funding. We always have an annual appeal week at Christmas. It is a time of year when we pay out a lot and we can all understand how it would feel to have very little. We do a campaign which encourages people to be more reflective. This year the focus is on recruiting volunteers, so the message of the campaign is about standing back and thinking about how you can give some of your time.

The nature of poverty in Ireland today is that it is very segregated. Many well-off people here need never even see poverty in their daily lives, so they have no sense of what it means. The challenge for us is to let those people know that poverty exists and to convey the message that poverty is caused by structural and policy decisions.

The toughest part of this job is that the agenda is so wide it's hard to focus. I'd like to spend most of my time facilitating members and ensuring their on-the-ground experience is heard, but I'm pulled by the reactive issues.

The best part is the times when you feel a sense of possibility, that you can be part of a process which is about changing things for the better for people.

In conversation with Jackie Bourke