Catherine Heaney is a strategic communications specialist with 25 years’ experience. She is a consultant at DHR Communications, a company she founded 17 years ago, and has worked on influential, public-interest campaigns in areas including human rights and reproductive rights.

Catherine has considerable board-level and non-executive leadership experience. In addition to her role as a trustee of One in Four, she is Chairperson of the National Museum of Ireland as well as Chairperson of the Citizens Information Board.  She is the most recent Chairperson of the Government’s Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility (operated under the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation).  She has served on a range of other boards across government, charity and NGO sectors. 

Catherine studied journalism at undergraduate level and criminology at postgraduate level at TUI Dublin (formerly DIT).  She holds an MPhil in Public History and Cultural Heritage from Trinity College Dublin, and she is a graduate of the prestigious Global Strategic Communications Programme at Columbia University in New York. 

Catherine has served as Chief Executive of the Irish Family Planning Association and Press Officer of the Labour Party.