Resistance to austerity in Ireland has until recently been
largely muted. In 2013 domestic
water charges were introduced and throughout 2014 a series of protests against
the charges emerged, culminating in over 90 separate marches on November 1st.
In this chapter we examine the discourses which are produced and
circulated by politicians and the mainstream media about this protest movement,
and offer a brief insight into the contemporary Irish context of austerity and
crisis. Our interest in how such discourses contribute to and reproduce hegemony
is influenced by Neo-Marxist and Foucauldian approaches (see Van Dijk, 1998;
Deacon et al. 1999).
We analyse the role of the phrase “sinister fringe” as a
discursive device, and unpick the ways in which it has been used to explain the
water charges protests to the Irish public. Our chapter is based upon a sample
drawn from print and broadcast media, between 1st February 2014 and
1st September 2015, a period which pre-dates the first protests. The titles
examined were The Irish Times; The Irish Examiner; The Sunday
Business Post; The Irish Daily Mail; The Sunday Independent
and The Irish Independent. We also purposively sampled from
current affairs television (two episodes of RTE’s Prime Time broadcast
in November 2014) and radio programming (an episode of Breakfast on
Newstalk which featured an interview of significance concerning the protests).
Our conclusions speak to the currency of the protest
paradigm as a means of understanding news media reporting of protest. We raise
concerns regarding the effects of this dominant frame on deliberative
democracy. We conclude that the media practices and values which lend this
paradigm, (and the neoliberal status quo), its resilience, are in turn a
product of the impacts of neoliberalism on the political economy of media
organisations.