PSNI's media director to take Garda job

The director of media and public relations for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Sinead McSweeney, is set to take up a major post with the Garda Siochana in Dublin.

She is to become the Commissioner Noel Conroy’s new director of communications at the Phoenix Park HQ.

McSweeney, 35, who has worked closely with Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde as part of his senior management team since June 2004, confirmed today she is leaving, but refused to comment on her future.

It’s understood she will take up her new job in October, heading up the Garda Press Office as well as devising and delivering an external and internal communications strategy.

While in Belfast she was in charge of a staff of 35.

McSweeney who is from Cork was a special advisor to Bertie Ahern in 1996 when he was leader of the Fianna Fáil opposition and the following year worked on his election campaign.

She spent a year with Michael Wood at the Department of Marine and Natural Resources before being appointed the first ever political advisor to an Attorney General, then David Byrne. The next five years she was on Michael McDowell’s staff, first in the Attorney General’s office and then at the Department of Justice.

Her husband is the barrister and political commentator Noel Whelan.