A two-month work placement in the St Patrick’s Day Festival press office gave James Treacy his first taste of the privileges that come with PR: “The streets were all blocked off for the parade and I remember walking down the middle of an empty road, lined with crowds either side, with everyone staring at me. I love those red carpet moments and hearing the paparazzi clicks.”

James studied geography and French at Maynooth University in his native Ireland before doing a masters in communications at Dublin: “My degree was quite broad, while the masters was more targeted, with modules devoted to journalism, marketing and even TV production,” he says.

Despite never having been to London, he felt drawn to the city and fought off competition from more than 500 applicants to secure one of a few places on Diffusion PR’s graduate scheme.

“We were expected to work from day one – there was no spoon feeding,” he says.

Among his accounts was Air New Zealand and corporate communications for L’Oreal.

“Diffusion bills by results – if there’s no coverage, the clients don’t pay. That drilled into me the importance of strong campaigns that deliver,” he says.

He promoted the airline’s safety videos, which have starred All Blacks and The Hobbit cast.

“That was always an exciting campaign to work on,” he says. “The videos didn’t merit just another standard press release, so we’d deliver them with a gift to the media, such as flight socks that look like a hobbit’s feet.”

And with L’Oreal, he enjoyed the challenge of telling corporate stories to the public. “It’s the hidden stories that people don’t talk about when they buy shampoo, but they can be really interesting. I took a film crew for BBC Click to L’Oreal’s laboratory in Paris, where they have all these clever techniques for testing hair.”

After three and a half years with Diffusion, he was tempted by a job in the press office for Tourism Australia. “Roles like this don’t come around very often,” he admits. “Even though I’d only been to Australia once, my events experience gave me an advantage.”

Events have been a big part of his role at Tourism Australia, where marketing and communications are closely aligned. His first project was a pop-up restaurant in Australia House, before he worked on “Invite the world to dinner”, when the tourist board hosted more than 80 food and wine influencers including AA Gill and Heston Blumenthal for a dinner experience in Hobart.

“My friends think my job is all glamour,” he says. “They don’t know about all the late nights. Nor did they see me wading across a river with a camera in the rain, looking like a drowned rat on the set of an ITV documentary.”

But he admits there have been times when he has pinched himself: “Last January, I was in a helicopter flying over Sydney Harbour Bridge while we filmed the Bridge Climb.”

In November came a career highlight merging TV royalty and actual royalty, when Tourism Australia hosted a preview screening of Sir David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef series, attended by Prince Philip.

“We had a minute-by-minute running order, which seemed to change daily in the lead-up. It was huge pressure, and it was a surreal experience meeting Attenborough. But I relished being part of such an intricate high-profile event.”

One day he’d like to head up his own PR team, but he vows never to leave the PR frontline entirely and lose contact with journalists.

“Good media contacts are the bread and butter of PR,” he says. “I’d always want to play an active role in researching and pitching campaigns.” And he’ll never forget his golden rule of PR: “Less is more,” he says. “A single page in the Financial Times is better than 20 ‘In briefs’.”