This research is concerned with the impact that the Irish economic crash had on the communication strategies of the trade union sector – specifically, how the trade unions in the public sector responded to the crash, how national newspapers reported and treated that response, and what lessons, if any, were learned by the trade union movement from the fallout, specifically in terms of communicating policy and media engagement. Three levels of analysis are presented within the research: 1) a quantitative content analysis of national newspaper titles to determine the levels and type of press attention paid to the economic crash and the response of the trade union movement to same; 2) a qualitative sentiment analysis of that same press coverage with a specific emphasis on the news values that informed such coverage; and 3) an extensive set of 27 in-depth semi-structured interviews with the leaders of all the main trade unions, the press advisors of same, the industry correspondents of key national media outlets and a smaller number of interviews with government advisors active at the time of the economic collapse. A particular research emphasis is put on these interviews due to the paucity of same in the existing literature and because they give a deeper context to the crisis that unfolded than media content analysis alone. The research findings indicate that the trade union movement was wholly unprepared for the communication challenges posed by the economic crash and that while government and media were similarly unprepared, the solutions to the crash proposed by government and amplified by media outlets doubly disadvantaged the trade union movement – i.e. not only was it unprepared for the communication challenges posed by the economic crash, it was also forced into a defensive communications strategy by virtue of the solutions proposed by government and amplified by media outlets. It finds that one of the key lessons of this bruising episode for the trade union movement is a recognition that the movement needs to be continuously proactive in communicating its economic perspective – as evidenced by its post-crash establishment of the Nevin Economic Research Institute [NERI].