PR industry seeks to work harder to reflect the Ireland it speaks for

Time for a rethink on diversity and inclusion as Harris PR is holding up a mirror to the communications industry 

Carolina Lucca, from Brazil, a recipient of the Harris PR bursary, with Sonia Harris Pope, founder and managing director of Harris PR.

Ireland has changed in the past few decades. To our enormous benefit we have more ethnic diversity in our communities, (slowly) increasing gender equality, better understanding of neurodivergency, and more widespread LGBTQ+ inclusion.  And yet the industry responsible for shaping how organisations communicate with the Irish public has been slow to catch up. The PR sector has a diversity problem - and until recently, nobody had actually measured how serious it was.

That changed in March of this year, when Harris PR published the inaugural Public Relations DEI Report: the first comprehensive benchmark for diversity, equity and inclusion across Ireland's PR industry. I recently spoke with Sonia Harris Pope, founder and managing director of Harris PR, to find out what drove it, what the research discovered, and what employers – in PR and beyond - can actually do about it.