TWO newly-appointed communications officers with Cork County Council will be taking a broad, and positive approach to promoting the work being done by the local authority, and making it clear to the public that there is more to its role than roads.
Former news editor at The Echo, Robert McNamara, will be leading the communications team as the communications and promotions officer, while communications officer, Pamela Newenham, will bring another skill set to the role, having formerly worked as a business journalist with The Irish Times, and editor of Silicon Docks: The Rise of Dublin as a Global Tech Hub.
Both Robert and Pamela attended a recent meeting of the West Cork Municipal District to introduce themselves to the local authority members.
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Robert outlined how his journalism career began as a reporter and news editor at Changing Ireland magazine and how, in 2014, he was awarded the Sunday Times ‘Young Journalist of the Year’.
Having acted as both the City Council and County Council reporter for The Echo, Robert said he has a tremendous amount of respect for what councillors do, and he said he is looking forward to working with all of the local authority members.
As part of enhancing public understanding about what the local authority is doing, as well as trying to reach a large audience, Pamela outlined how her background is a mixture of journalism, PR and marketing.
In her varied career, Pamela held the role as marketing director at CoolPlanet, a global leader in industrial-scale decarbonisation; and was co-founder of GirlCrew, an online and offline community for women with more than 100,000 members in over 50 cities worldwide.
Pamela said she sees her new role as coming from a promotional and marketing base and hopes to promote the good news stories, and raise the profile of the council so the public knows there is more to it than roads.
West Cork Municipal District chairperson, Cllr Caroline Cronin (FG) welcomed these two, new, and highly experienced, communications officers, as did Cllr Deirdre Kelly (FF) who said: ‘There is so much going on in West Cork alone, we could be promoting that a lot more.’
Before becoming a member of Cork County Council, Cllr Daniel Sexton (Ind Ire) said he was guilty of thinking that the local authority was all about roads, ‘so it is important that we share all the good work that the council does and get the good news stories out there.’
Cllr Danny Collins (Ind Ire) agreed, saying the recent ‘roadshows’ about funding for community events had a lot of good feedback.
Cllr Collins said there are a lot of local authority grant schemes that people need to learn about, and he welcomed a new era of greater engagement with the public.
