Respected Irish public relations executive Brendan Bracken has died after a long illness. He was 72.
Mr Bracken worked in the IDA Ireland press office before joining life and pensions provider Irish Life, where he spent more than 17 years, latterly as public relations manager. He left in 1991 to establish his own agency, Bracken PR.
His clients included CIÉ, the University of Limerick, Waterford Institute of Technology, Fás, and the Institute of Bankers.
However, he is perhaps best known among Irish journalists for his work over many years with Bank of Scotland, who quit the market here post the 2008 financial crash. He won an award in 2004 for his work on managing Bank of Scotland's entry into the Irish mortgage market.
Mr Bracken retired in 2018 and the agency was dissolved. Hailing from Connemara, he went to school at the Cistercian College in Roscrea, and forged his career in Dublin, where he lived with his family.
He was an occasional contributor to The Irish Times on hillwalking, and his daughter Ali worked at the newspaper for a period before joining the Sunday Tribune and subsequently the Daily Mail.
Mr Bracken was a grandson of JK Bracken, a co-founder of the GAA, and a nephew of Brendan Bracken, a former Conservative party MP who was minister for information in Winston Churchill’s government during the second World War.
