Roger Berkeley

Roger Berkeley builds international coalitions for the renewal of Ireland and the West, drawing on more than a decade of work across corporate and political cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. He leads Setanta, a nonprofit building partnerships between American and Irish civil society, and Birch Lea Strategies, a boutique political and communications consultancy for mission-driven organizations in Ireland and Europe. He also writes about Ireland’s decline and opportunities for renewal for leading outlets in the US and Europe.

Most recently, he was Director of Social Media at Alliance Defending Freedom, the largest conservative legal advocacy group in the world. There he built and implemented a digital advocacy strategy to litigate ADF’s issues in the court of public opinion, working across ADF’s legal and policy teams and its global Counter-Censorship Taskforce. He spearheaded communications opposing the EU Digital Services Act, creating viral content around moments like Päivi Räsänen’s hate speech conviction in Finland and ADF’s partnership with X to sue the European Commission. Berkeley also launched the live broadcasting function at ADF, scaling viewership by 20% between January and June 2026. His first major rollout, for ADF’s Religious Liberty Summit in July 2025, reached one million views.

Birch Lea Strategies

Berkeley has been active in Irish politics since 2015. In 2024, Birch Lea Strategies convened the coalition that defeated the hate speech provisions in the Hate Speech Bill. As part of this campaign, he organized the Free Speech Summit, sponsored by ADF International, Free Speech Ireland, and Michael Shellenberger’s Public. The Summit, which included a Leinster House press briefing, a public event at Trinity College, and a reception at the College Green Hotel, sold out in five days. It convened international speakers like Graham Linehan, Andy Ngo, and Andrew Doyle, as well as Senators Rónán Mullen and Sharon Keogan. On the campaign trail, he provided communications support in the local, European Parliament, Westminster, and Senate elections. He supported a party nearly tripling its elected representatives and launched a Senate campaign by growing the candidate’s organic engagement a hundredfold. Birch Lea Strategies also trained a global network of conservative communicators in profile-building.

Previous work

As a Marketing Consultant at Accenture, Berkeley worked with Meta and Pinterest, directing €12 million in annual client ad spend for hundreds of small businesses across Europe, Asia, and Africa. At Pinterest, he led strategy training for the North American Advanced Optimization team.

Berkeley began in campaigns while studying law at University College Dublin. He founded Students For Fair Representation, a student lobby group campaigning for free speech and association on campus, and within two years had chapters at every university in the country. In 2017, he was the Campaign Manager for Katie Ascough’s successful bid to become President of the UCD Students’ Union. The unexpected victory—placing a pro-life activist at the helm of the largest pro-abortion student advocacy group in Ireland the year of the abortion referendum—was hailed as the first pro-life political victory in Ireland since 1983. The Pro Life Campaign recruited Berkeley as National Campus Director that same year to build a movement of more than 600 students across the country to campaign for life on campus, on the streets, and in the media.

His essays, which trace Ireland’s institutional decline and its stakes for the West, have appeared in Law & Liberty, Public Discourse, The Daily Wire, and The European Conservative.

Berkeley lives in Northern Virginia with his family.

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