You can easily overestimate what you can do in one year, but usually underestimate what you can do in ten years.
The Orthodontic Society of Ireland usually meets twice a year for “a scientific meeting”. This typically involves lectures, the occasional workshop and a trade show with a view to professional development and to share a bit of time with other orthodontists, as it’s a rare occasion to be in a room full of people with the few individuals that understand each other.
The meetings are Autumn and Spring. This year, 2026, the Autumn meeting is in Killashee House near Naas with the theme being “Contemporary Orthodontics: From Digital Planning to Clinical Excellence” and the main speakers are Chris Laspos and Blazhkiv Nazar.
But there wasn’t a Spring Meeting this year. Why not? Because, for the first time ever, Dublin* hosted the European Orthodontic Congress (EOC) in June and to avoid too many conflicts on the diary for professional development the OSI deferred the Spring Meeting to the following year. I mean, we did it when London was the venue for the International Congress, so we were deffo going to do it if we had an international conference in town.
It’s not just a matter of the European Orthodontic Society rocking up in Dublin one week, it was a multi-year project by the OSI to get them to choose Dublin as a venue and surprisingly it all began in Killashee house about 10 years ago.
I was secretary for the OSI at the time and our president was Sinead O’Hanrahan (who operates Fermoy Orthodontics) and we got an email in from Fáilte Ireland one day about bringing the European meeting here. I was quite impressed by their proactive nature – they were aware that there was an academic summer event that routinely attracted thousands of attendees (and whoever was accompanying them) and decided that it might as well be in Dublin as Prague or Sorrento or Edinburgh or Reykjavik.
And why not? So Sinead convened an OSI “think-in” to decide the strategic aims of the Society for the next decade. The meeting involved the OSI Council of the Day, the OSI former presidents (an ad hoc group known as ExPOSI for Ex-presidents of the OSI) and we decided the OSI should start to get a bit more ambitious with what we try to provide for the members.
Among other things, we resolved:
1. To have 200 members in the OSI within 10 years
2. To have 100 delegates at our own conferences within 10 years
3. That Dublin would host an EOC within 10 years
We changed the ideas on international membership a bit, so we still run below 200 members. There’s only about 150 orthodontists in Ireland so it’ll be a while before we hit that target.
Did we get 100 delegates at our conferences? Sort of. We increased the scope of our autumn conferences to have events for orthodontists, dental nurses, orthodontic therapists and orthodontic technicians, so we usually do get over 100 for those events.
But the EOS is in the bag. It would have been well within the 10 years except for COVID 19 in the middle of the plan – a lesson for us all.
I’ve been a big fan of Meat Loaf since I was about 12, and as such I concede that 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.
So ten years on from our OSI Think-In at Killashee House, we’re back there to see how we did over a decade.
* Not the first time in Ireland though, the EOC came to Belfast in 1960.