Rossa Fanning has served as Attorney General of Ireland since December 2022. As Attorney General, he attends Cabinet as the legal adviser to the Government and is the chief law officer of the State.
He graduated with undergraduate and postgraduate law degrees from University College Dublin before being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and a University Fellowship to pursue an LLM at Michigan Law School.
He was called to the Irish Bar in 1999 and became a Senior Counsel in 2016. He is an Accredited Mediator and was admitted to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 2019.
He is a bencher and ex officio Council Member of the Honorable Society of King’s Inns, a Member of the General Council of the Bar of Ireland, a Vice-President of the Irish Centre for European Law and a Full Adjunct Professor at the UCD Sutherland School of Law.
As Attorney General, he leads significant litigation on behalf of the Irish State before domestic and international courts. He appeared for the State in the Irish Supreme Court in three cases in 2023, including the successful defence of the Article 26 reference on the Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2023. In February 2024 he represented Ireland in oral hearings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.