Paddy Gormley likes to challenge conventional thinking. 
He believes that human behaviour is largely governed by dubious assumptions that are rarely called into question. His factual writing is principally concerned with re-evaluating such assumptions and encouraging readers to think again. 

Until the Millennium, PG's factual writing was exclusively aimed at business people, and professional partnerships in particular. 

Since 2000, Paddy Gormley has applied his business experience and advocacy skills to the writing of persuasive copy for diverse organisations and individuals in the context of his web design business. 

Other factual/debating projects include a major study of the creative process and a critical review of the philosophy of Scientific Realism. 

See the teaching resources page of this website for further factual projects that have been singled out because they are designed to assist study rather than simply to provoke thought. 

The Meta Matters project was inspired in 2008 by Paddy Gormley's realisation that Richard Dawkins' stance as a Radical Atheist  - a firm believer in the non-existence of God, as opposed to a mere agnostic - was inconsistent with his role as a scientist:  science is unable to prove the non-existence of anything. 

PG set out to challenge the seemingly widely held view that the existence of the material world has been proven beyond question.  From the outset, he determined to keep God out of the equation, instead using scientific principles and recent developments in technology as the corner-stones of his logic. 

Click on the image on the right for the Meta Matters website, which includes click-to-play film and audio illustrations of Paddy Gormley's fascinating work in this field. 

Paddy Gormley's interest in creative writing (as detailed on the drama/fiction page of this site) has given rise to his growing interest in the subject of creativity.  His book, Language with Altitude, (see the Teaching Resources page for further details) sets out a radically new approach to creative writing, based on PG's study of the music of language and the workings of memory and the mind. 

Paddy Gormley is seeking a publisher for his second book on creativity, Re Creativity, begun in 2008. Re Creativity aims to bring together, for the first time in one place, all PG's teaching and thoughts about the creative process, memory and imagination. 

Early drafts of the opening chapters of the book suggest that Re Creativity will extend Paddy Gormley's thinking into new areas by causing him to examine how creativity affects people's working and private lives and, in turn, how people may seek to improve themselves by increasing their creative potential. 

The click-to-play excerpt (right) is taken from the opening chapters of the book, which explore the development of creative skills in childhood and consider how and why our thinking as adults tends to be largely constrained by rules. 

Paddy Gormley began his website design business in 2001, applying his questioning, analytical approach to ensure that clients' websites were truly purposeful, and providing clear, well-written copy that satisfied the demands of website visitors and search engines alike.  PG has created more than 100 websites for a wide range of organisations and individuals. 

His portfolio website, paddygormley.info (click right), links to 60 or so of these sites that are still current. 

This series of six quarter-hour radio talks offers a further perspective on the creative power of radio, using Paddy Gormley's models for creativity, memory and imagination to explain why, on radio, "the pictures are better". 

Click on the image on the right for the Write Minded website, which includes a full recording of the first of the talks and synopses of the other five. 

PG developed exceptional analytical thinking and writing skills when working as an independent legal business consultant in the 1990s.  His major research study into top UK companies' attitudes to solicitors, in 1991, New Approaches to Client Development, revealed widespread client dissatisfaction with the service (as distinct from the advice) offered by leading law firms.  This prompted Paddy Gormley to begin a nine-year crusade aimed at persuading solicitors to develop better approaches to pricing, practice economics, marketing and service delivery. 

He gained a considerable reputation among leading lawyers for his iconoclastic writing and public speaking.  PG's writing in this field includes more than fifty articles, two self-published books (Practical Pricing and Practice without Precedent), two major research reports and countless presentations at conferences, workshops and dinners. 

Much of Paddy Gormley's writing for Leading Lawyers remains relevant today.  Accordingly, PG hopes to develop an internet-based archive during 2010.  Click the images on the right for illustrative PDFs: 

• A 7-page research-based extract from PG's 1997 book, Practical Pricing (above right);
• Three articles by PG:  Competition Raw, Multidisciplinary Personages and The Three Little Partners (below right).

During his ten years as a self-employed management consultant, Paddy Gormley developed a side-line as an after-dinner speaker.  His numerous articles and conference appearances, usually suffused with mordant and mischievous good humour, led to invitations to local law society dinners as guest speaker. He decided to make use of his facility for rhyming verse by inventing Old Possum's Book of Fat Cats, a putative research project whereby PG claimed to have found early drafts of well known poems with references to lawyers that somehow failed to make it into first editions. 

Shall I compare thee to an autumn day?
Thou art a windbag and intemperate. 
Twelve guineas is a frightful price to pay
when thou hast failed th'agreed completion date. 
How can a man so base and so incompetent
purport to be worth nine-sixteenths percent? 

Click below right for Gullible's Travails, Paddy Gormley's withering adaptation of The Owl and the Pussycat, in which he chided solicitors for their irrational obsessions with hourly rate charging and growth via mergers. 

As Paddy Gormley's sons were growing up in the 1990s, he began to think ahead to the day when they must leave home to start their own lives, and wondered what advice he might offer them.  He quickly decided that "a book [would be] so much better than us looking one another in the eyes for hours on end", and set about writing one accordingly. 

Valiant Be is written from the perspective of a man in his forties (and, later, fifties) reflecting on how his life has been shaped by decisions made in late teens and early twenties. Paddy Gormley was determined that his sons must find their own way in life and that he must not tell them what to do.  Accordingly, in Valiant Be, he merely describes his own experiences in candid, self-critical terms, in the hope that others may learn something from his mistakes. 

Valiant Be comprises nine chapters, dealing with subjects as diverse as integrity, friendship and money.  Paddy Gormley began writing it in 1996, and completed it in ten years later, in his youngest son's eighteenth year.  Click on the player below right to hear a full chapter of the book. 

Valiant Be remains unpublished. 

Paddy Gormley's late father, Patrick Gormley, also known as Paddy, and uncle Tom Gormley, both served as MPs in the Stormont parliament (Northern Ireland) in the 1950s and 1960s.  Paddy's career was ended by a near fatal car accident in 1965, from which he never fully recovered.

Tom Gormley's daughter Jennifer asked the younger Paddy Gormley to provide a chapter for her "biopictography", The Life and Times of Paddy Gormley (ISBN 09546144).  Click below right to hear Paddy Gormley's audio recording of the chapter, a reflection on his late father's life from the perspective of the library that Paddy senior accumulated in the later years of his life.