Biography | Sharon McGuinness — She Took the Director's Chair at Telakkakatu 6

On 1 December 2022 Sharon McGuinness began a five-year term as Executive Director of the European Chemicals Agency.

ECHA announced the start from Helsinki the same day.

Bjorn Hansen had retired in March.

Shay O'Malley had been acting director since 1 April.

The board had selected her on 22 June after an open competition run by the Commission.

The agency no longer sat on Annankatu.

Its first twelve years were in a former print works that is now a hotel.

The present headquarters opened on Telakkakatu 6, in Punavuori, at the end of 2019.

The office block and the conference centre face each other across Pursimiehenkatu, linked by a skybridge.

The main entrance is on the dock-side street.

She arrived as someone the house already knew.

Ireland had sent her to the Management Board from 2014 to 2021.

She chaired that board from October 2016 to October 2020.

Before Helsinki she had run Ireland's Health and Safety Authority from 1 July 2018 until October 2022.

The ChemistryViews interview later recorded that she had been coming to the city since 2007 and called it her adopted city.

That sentence is a paraphrase of a named interview, not a plaque on the door.

The door that matters is this one.

A pharmacologist from Belfield now signed the agency's decisions from a waterfront block that did not exist when REACH entered into force.

Photo: Vadelmavene, 10 April 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons