Madam, - As someone who spent most of his professional life in public relations in an area not too far from Monica Leech's original stomping ground, I am bemused by the current controversy that has grown up around her activities at national level.
The scale and excesses of so-called "top-level" public relations have always horrified those of us who had a different concept of its function and application.
In a country with a handful of daily newspapers and (up to relatively recently) a single broadcast news source, the effort and money expended on PR, and particularly on influencing media opinion, have always seemed a bit of a joke.
Sadly, the budgets seemed to increase in inverse proportion to the amount of space or airtime available to accommodate the press releases generated.
At the same time, local media (both print and broadcast) have expanded dramatically without the obvious attention of the national public relations sector.
That is not to say that good, and even great, work cannot be done in promoting worthwhile programmes and projects so that people can understand, support and participate.
But in a 30-year career I have never met more than a handful who have the talent, the insight and (yes!) the humility to do the public relations job as it should be done.
And this is despite the fact that hundreds, maybe even thousands, of young souls who "love meeting people" and "want to make a contribution" have graduated in the obscure science.
The job of communicating government goals and priorities on a national basis has been left for too long in the hands of Dublin-based and Dublin-oriented consultancies with limited national vision and unlimited expense accounts.
There are still bright, sensible hard-working PR people (most of them women) in the provinces who have a much more realistic approach to communications and to fees. Waterford even has a very capable PR consultant with a strong political involvement whose greatest attribute may be that you've never heard of her. It's time the balance was at least adjusted, if not radically reappraised. - Yours, etc.,
DENIS BERGIN, Charleston South Carolina, USA.