Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

When anyone ever mentions the future of Public Relations, the ensuing conversation typically revolves around the Internet and how it will affect our industry. In Ireland, the Internet might not immediately spring to mind, but words like blog and Bebo are slowly becoming part of our vocabulary.

The main challenge facing the Irish PR industry in my opinion though is the growing diversity in our society. The Central Statistics Office recently announced that there is an increase of 90,000 people working in the country. Of that 90,000, over half of the figure can be accounted for by foreign workers. These figures might seem like chump change to international readers of this website, but they are anything but insignificant to a nation that has a population of only four million people.

Apparently there are more languages spoken in Dublin than any other city in the world. Personally I don’t believe that, but all the same it does highlight a key challenge facing the public relations profession - the lack of diversity within our ranks. More importantly though, we have little knowledge about the multitude of communities popping up in our midst, so how are we meant to assist organisations to communicate with them?

Numerous publications are starting to appear to cater for these new audiences such as the Polski Herald, the Polish version of a leading Irish title, the Evening Herald. However, some of these publications are fly-by-nights and other are very difficult to liaise with from a PR perspective. Our industry can’t seem to communicate with media organisations that operate in our own native tongue Gaeilge, so the prospect of dealing with Chinese or Brasilian ones is quite daunting.

I hate saying it, but the Internet might just be a way of solving this particular problem. There’s so much hype about blogs, podcasts, etc, but there really doesn’t seem to be a better fit for communicating with the new entrants into our society. A lot of migrants use the Internet so they can keep in touch with their families at home.

Given that these workers are starting to spread out across the country rather than simply being stuck in Dublin, the Internet offers more of an efficient communications channel due to the fact that the cultural newsletters currently in existence don’t have the same distribution power as mainstream titles. However, we’ll start running into the same problems as many other industries due to the poor broadband infrastructure across the country.

Either way, it’s in our interests to help develop and form these channels. Not only so that we will be familiar with the medium, but also so we can forge closer links to the various communities and develop an understanding about them.

We still have to bear in mind the subtle differences between our cultures. For example, all the talk in Ireland around the Internet is about Bebo, the social networking website, which is far more popular here than MySpace, which many US teens use. If we are to go down the route of using the web to communicate with these audiences, we’ll need to learn how they use the net. For example, Bebo is a useless tool if trying to communicate with Brasilians as another social networking website, Orkut, is far more popular in that community.

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