Media Conflict Memory in Ireland: Dislocation, Fracture, and a Public Path Forward

Ireland is an important case study for understanding the relationship between media and conflicts, both past and resurgent. The historic conflict between Britain and Ireland, the turbulence of the “Troubles” in the second half of the 20th century, and tensions over Brexit and the Irish/EU border with the UK on the island continue and present conflict dynamics. Theoretically, this chapter explores mediated memories of the Troubles through the three key phases in the circuit of cultural production: production, representation, and public reception as they relate to conflict. Empirically, the chapter draws on data from discourse analysis of news reports on the Troubles; in-depth interviews with journalists involved in covering the conflict; focus groups and interviews with participants from both Ireland and Northern Ireland; as well as social media. Analysis reveals that representations of the Troubles fixated on violence in a de-contextualized way from the origin or motivations of perpetrators. Journalists were strongly focused on professionalism, and while distrustful of state institutions, they were reliant on them as primary sources. Finally, publics were largely disconnected from both journalists and mainstream media representations; our informants from both Ireland and Northern Ireland expressed a complex sense of multiple intersecting identities and a contextualized understanding of unresolved trauma, focusing on justice, outlining socioeconomic conditions and institutional failures in the past conflict and its current impacts. Contrary to the circuit of cultural production framework, which implies that media memories of the conflict circulate and feed into processes of production, representation, and audiences, our findings indicate fracturing and dislocation between these processes, with production, representation, and reception following divergent paths. These, in turn, reveal illiberal, colonial, post-colonial, and politically contested dynamics in the Irish media system, which question its classification as a liberal system.