Ireland has been somewhat dilatory in recognising public relations as a necessary part of the commercial and industrial field. By all I hear, such Irish concerns as have public relations officers employ them without any very clear ideas of their proper function.
Rightly used, the P.R.O. should be an interpreter of his company's staff. He should have the confidence of his directors in company developments, and they, in turn, should have confidence in his judgment as to how those developments are to be "put across" to the public.
According to one or two P.R.O.'s of my acquaintance, however, they have found, on taking their jobs, that they were expected, as their most vital duty, to get as many photographs of as many executives as were in a sufficiently high salary bracket into the papers as often as possible (a sticky job when there are large numbers of executives all jockeying for preferment and, therefore, for publicity).
On the other hand, one of them told me that when it came to news of real importance, he found that he was often expected to keep it out of the papers, even if the newspapermen already knew of it from their own sources. "In other words," he said, "I was expected to exploit my personal friendship with newspapermen to prevent them from doing their job."
This outlook on public relations has long since been discarded in Britain and America. No doubt, in time, Irish executives will take the more mature and adult attitude too.
The Irish Times,
July 26th, 1951