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, 1997).
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 paper 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 and brings us through to the present day. 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.
Van Dijk, Teun. (1997) Discourse as Social Interaction. London: Sage Publications.