Tom Kelly (Ireland)

Tom Kelly, OBE is a media commentator and former Vice Chairman of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland. The grandson of the IRA War of Independence veteran and Irish Labour activist Tom Kelly, he attended the Abbey Grammar School in Newry followed by the University of Ulster.

He was assistant to the former Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and MP for Newry and Armagh, Seamus Mallon. With the backing of the United States based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs Kelly set up the Social Democratic Group on behalf of the SDLP. Kelly was the communications director in most of the key SDLP electoral campaigns until 2001. In 1994 he moved into public relations fronting a Belfast office for Dublin based PR company Drury Communications. He subsequently bought that company out and renamed it Stakeholder Communications which now operates out of London, Dublin and Newry as well as Belfast. In 2001 he was appointed by the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Mandelson to serve on the first Northern Ireland Policing Board. In 2002 he won the prestigious PRCA Award for the best Corporate Communications Campaign. Kelly is heavily involved in the Credit Union movement of Ireland.

He is a regular media contributor to political affairs programmes and has a weekly column in the leading morning nationalist paper in Northern Ireland, the Irish News. Kelly is a Visiting Professor at the University of Ulster's School of Communication. In 2006 he accepted an OBE.