Interest Groups and Lobbying Specialist Group

Convenor
Prof Gary Murphy, School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, Collins Avenue, Dublin 9, Ireland, tel: +353 1 7005664, email: gary.murphy[at]dcu.ie

PSAI Committee Liaison
Dr Conor McGrath, 10 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, Dublin 4, Ireland, tel: + 353 87 2518486, email: conor.p.mcgrath[at]gmail.com

Aims
The Interest Groups and Lobbying Specialist Group of the PSAI exists to promote academic and practitioner discourse on a developing aspect of Irish politics. It seeks to bring together all those interested in interest representation and lobbying, both generally and as it is conducted in Ireland, from a range of perspectives. Much practitioner writing is excessively uncritical; much journalist writing on lobbying is superficial in the extreme; and much academic work is entirely theoretical offering few insights into the realities of the process. This specialist group hopes to redress all these imbalances to some extent. It will encourage dialogue between scholars and practitioners, and thereby develop a more rounded perspective on lobbying in Ireland.

Activities
The Interest Groups and Lobbying Specialist Group intends to be active, in a number of ways. It will run an email distribution list for members with regular information about calls for papers, new publications, news reports concerning lobbying, and so on. The group will actively seek opportunities to both help individual members to get published, and to organise combined proposals for conferences (such as PSA and APSA) and special journal issues. The immediate priority will be to organise a conference on lobbying in Ireland in 2010 at Dublin City University (to feature academics and local lobbyists) and to encourage an Irish publisher to produce a book of the conference proceedings. The group will be pro-active at building its membership, both among academics in and out of Ireland and among professionals in the Irish lobbying community. It will develop links with relevant professional groups, including the Public Relations Institute of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Government Affairs Group, the European Centre for Public Affairs, and so on.

Members
The Interest Groups and Lobbying Specialist Group welcomes both academic and professional members with an interest in the developing sphere of interest representation/lobbying generally and particularly in Ireland. To become a member of the Group, you must be a member of the PSAI, which you can join here. You do not have to belong to an Irish university to be a PSAI member or to join the Group.