No need to phone a friend, ask audience or 50/50

Bradley Bytes – A Sort of Political Column by Dara Bradley

Let’s play a game of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Pretend we’re at the €1 million question.

Here goes: which one of the following subjects did Galway senator Lorraine Higgins, the Labour Party’s Seanad Éireann spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and Trade, issue a press release about recently?

Was it:

A) Condemning the use of chemical weapons during the ongoing civil war in Syria;

B) Condemning new regressive anti-gay laws introduced in Russia;

C) Calling for the United Nations to take action in Egypt over the massacre of innocent protestors;

D) Welcoming the planned upgrade of a caravan park in Kinvara, County Galway

Hint: It has nothing to do with Lorraine’s position as party spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Trade in the Seanad; and has everything to do with Lorraine positioning herself ahead of the next General Election in a crowded Galway East constituency that has been reduced to a three-seater.

No lifelines will be wasted answering this, we suspect.

False public relations

The faux politeness of PR people when emailing journalists and reporters can often be nauseating.

And the artificial familiarity and silly ‘small talk’ at the beginning of their emails is just as bad – this is particularly the case with the ‘Dublin PR’ crew, who don’t really know where Galway is but who know it’s a place somewhere ‘down the country’.

The following is an example of the annoying stuff in an email received recently from a Jack Murray, a Dublin-based PR.

“Hi Dara, I hope all’s well and you’re having a good summer. I was in West Cork for the heatwave in July, it was great,” it said, as if we were long lost friends, before he cut to the chase, something or other about a book.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for being polite but stop pretending you care how my summer is going and at least get the county of the newspaper you’re emailing right.

Bear in mind, I’ve never met Jack, have never been to West Cork – and that he’s sent the same message to a colleague in the Connacht Tribune not realising that we’re based in Galway and not Cork.

What if we replied with a message like this: “Hi Jack, sorry to be the one to break it to you but seeing as you brought it up – Dara actually passed away from heat exhaustion on a beach while holidaying in West Cork during the heat wave in July . . . ” signed by my replacement.

Would PRs then think before they press the send button on faux familiar emails to people they don’t know?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.