Two very different first choices
Her strongest school subjects were music and maths, and a careers advisor suggested she try actuarial studies. Her first CAO choice was actuary at UCD. Her second was Irish music and dance at the University of Limerick. She got the first, and the four years were genuinely hard.
That difficulty turned out to be the useful part. It was the first time she could not understand something immediately, the first time she had to go and ask for support. She finished the degree, did a work placement, and came out with a clear conclusion: it was a brilliant career, well paid, and it was not lighting her up.
The conversation that changed the direction
McCaffrey travelled to Australia, and there she met a woman who had spent years in the humanitarian sector. McCaffrey had been circling that world for a while. She had volunteered in China with Special Olympics Ireland at seventeen, an experience she describes as blowing her mind open, and she had looked at a master’s in humanitarian development.
The conversation lasted about two hours and it was unsentimental. This work is hard, the woman told her. Short term volunteering feels great and lovely, but the reality is difficult. What McCaffrey needed most at that point was not passion, which she had, but a skill set. And then came the question that redirected everything: what about accountancy?
If you are good at maths, the argument went, and you have got through an actuarial degree, accountancy will teach you tax, law and general business. Go and develop your skills, and see where that takes you.
She applied to Grant Thornton, having already missed the graduate window, found a page on the website that was supposed to be closed, and got an email from HR asking how she had managed it. A trainee spot had just opened. As she puts it, there has been a lot of luck along the way in terms of timing.
Her grandmother used to tell her she was lucky, which annoyed her when she was younger. Sinead Donovan’s response is worth keeping: you need to be good to be lucky, and you need to seize the opportunities, because a lot of people let luck pass them by.
One Young World gave her the language
McCaffrey went to the One Young World summit in Munich, and describes it as the thing that crystallised everything.
Her problem before that was not a lack of passion. It was too much of it, spread too widely. Asked what she cared about, she could list twenty five different things, from women and girls in sport to access to opportunity for people with disabilities. She could not articulate it coherently.
What One Young World unlocked was the sustainable development goals as a common language. Applying to the summit required her to say which goals she cared about and what she was doing about them. Suddenly a set of apparently random interests resolved into a pattern, and connected to a much bigger global picture.
It was, she says, pivotal. It also gave her the vocabulary to raise sustainability internally at work, at exactly the moment EU regulation was arriving. Three years earlier she would not have had the words.
Turning down the obvious opportunity
About seven or eight years into Grant Thornton, McCaffrey faced a real decision. One route was leading international work, with the promotion and the clear career logic that came with it. The other was sustainability, where the regulation was only just emerging, there were no clients yet, no team and no offering.
She sat in a room with three partners and said she wanted to do the thing that was not mapped out, and that she was passing up the opportunity that made total sense on paper.
They backed her. She is generous about what that meant, and honest that people only ever see what gets built, not the moment it was a gut instinct and a leap of faith. With Catherine Duncan she built out the offering and the team, and spent several years working with AIB on their sustainability strategy, covering climate risk integration and financial reporting.
Alongside the fee earning work she applied the same project management skills internally to develop Grant Thornton’s ED and I strategy. Her insight there is a good one for anyone wondering what they can contribute: her value was not being the expert, it was articulating a process and turning it into something that could live beyond one or two key people.
Sinead Donovan’s summary of the pattern is hard to improve on. Passion, purpose, pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and hard work.
Unkinking the hose
The Impact Investing Institute is an independent nonprofit that grew out of a UK government task force on social impact investing. McCaffrey describes it as a systems change organisation, working across the full spectrum of capital from large asset managers and pension funds through to family offices and foundations.
Her own work centres on the places where money is not currently flowing, convening people to build enough trust for an honest conversation about what is actually blocking it. The team calls it unkinking the hose. Everyone can agree in principle on why something should happen. Progress only comes from getting down to the specific blockers, some obvious, some much less so.
For a long time she had wrestled with a perceived gap between working in financial services and working in the humanitarian world. The institute is where those two things finally overlap.
A hopeless optimist with a healthy dose of realism
Asked whether she is hopeful, McCaffrey calls herself a hopeless optimist, partly to protect her own peace. There is plenty going wrong. Her response is to focus on what can actually be done, because sitting in the difficulty does not move anything.
What genuinely gives her hope is exposure. In this role she meets people doing remarkable things that simply are not visible in the news. She describes herself as a small cog among many people working hard on the same problems, and the job as being connective tissue between them.
Sinead Donovan makes a sharp observation here: much of what McCaffrey describes is the logic training of a Chartered Accountant applied to human systems, getting to the root of why A plus B does not equal C rather than dwelling on the fact that A and B are different. McCaffrey agrees, and adds humility to the list. She is comfortable saying she does not have the answers and is not the expert. She would rather be the person who accelerates the thinking.
Her closing advice
Asked for one message, she offered several, and apologised for it.
Be curious, and be willing to listen to what other people are doing, including well outside your own field. Every time you meet somebody, a little of yourself gets reflected back, so a diverse base of people is the key to unlocking your own potential.
Follow your gut instinct. Build your skill set. Get to know what you are good at and what you enjoy, then look for the crossovers.
And if you struggle to articulate your purpose, try mapping what you care about against the sustainable development goals. It worked for her, and she has recommended it to others since.
