First Blog Post

Hey y'all,

I'll be posting regular ideas, links and articles here in coming days but decided to start things off today with a brief chat about what I want to focus on with the blog.

So, my background - I'm Irish, studied in UCC and was quite involved in debating and drama while I was there. I studied in Boston College for a year.

When I came back, I got a job in publishing in Ireland, and then worked for Oxford University Press in the UK. Then I made the daring move back to Tipperary to work as a Parliamentary Assistant for a T.D. I've been involved in drama, politics and communications my whole life, in one way or another...

So, that's me, in summary... Wordy, studious, hard-working, passionate, intelligent, and, in a recent discovery, pretty dogged.

What do I want from the blog? Well, to hone my thinking about communications, media, politics, PR and policy by using my blog as a pensieve of sorts.

So often, in the course of working on campaign work, or communications, or PR, I find ideas jet past me or I think of examples of crisis communications or social media strategy that I want to unpack and think through.

All too often, I leave those dense clots of creative, where the real ideas are and where real value lies to examine another time, or work on later, when I have more time. No more of that, I have decided, the blog's the thing.

I'll be looking at international and Irish examples of people communicating well, or failing dismally, trying to forensically take apart some glutted examples of internal communications, or PR strategy, or creative campaigning so that I can break the case studies down and figure out how it works for me.

I find that the more I write, the better I think, the more I can. Well, the more I can...

I'll quote Obama, but not in relation to féidir-ing:

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change we seek."

Barack Obama