Views of Place, Views of Irishness

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Figures

Figure 1. Recurrent text structure across Éirnews genres.

Figure 2. Argument structure of MacNeill’s lecture as reported in the Freeman’s Journal.

Figure 3. Overall rhetorical strategy of nationalist newspapers on the Irish language.

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Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of two years of intensive research carried out within the framework of the national PRIN 2015 project “Knowledge dissemination across media in English: Continuity and change in discourse strategies, ideologies, and epistemologies” funded by the Italian Ministry of Education (Prot. TJ8ZAS) over the past two years. I am profoundly grateful to Prof. Nicholas Brownlees, Prof. Marina Dossena and Prof. Stefano Rosso, the other members of LADES (The Language of Discovery, Exploration and Settlement), the Research Unit I worked with for the duration of the project, for their unwavering support and strong friendship. I would also like to thank Prof. Lorenzo Bertucelli and Dr Fabio Degli Esposti, respectively Associate and Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Studies on Language and Culture (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), for the constructive feedback they provided in relation to the draft of Chapter 5. Furthermore, I would like to express heartfelt gratitude to the staff of the National Library of Ireland: this volume would never have been completed without the passionate commitment with which they do their outstanding job. Finally, I would like to thank the staff of the following libraries, which also provided materials highly relevant to the research: Cill Rónáin, Árainn Library (Inishmore, Co. Galway), Biblioteca Umanistica (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali ‘Nicola Matteucci’ (University of Bologna) and the Vatican Library.

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CHAPTER 1

Journalism in Ireland

What this book is

There is little doubt that news discourse has been a favourite subject of investigation over the past thirty years. It is also clear that a growing number of scholars have adopted a historical perspective in their analyses of the periodical press in the Anglophone world. This work is situated half-way between these two trends. It focuses on the news from a predominantly discourse angle, and it deals with news texts from a specific period in history. While, however, a considerable amount of researchers have taken England as a case in point, this volume concentrates on Ireland.

By reason of its geographical proximity to England, Ireland’s fate was tied to England’s for a long time. Predictably, this had a discernible impact on the Irish press as well, especially in its early days. The starting point of this book is the notion that Irish journalism deserves to be investigated in its own right, rather than merely as a derivative of its English neighbour. In this respect, the historical background behind the development of news media in Ireland has been described accurately. On the other hand, although newspapers and periodicals have been discussed with a view to the evolution of their contents, or else they have served as supporting materials for scholars in Irish history, little to no interest has been taken so far in the language of the Irish press and the structure or discursive organisation of its news texts.

In the attempt to contribute to filling this gap, this work is intended to carry out a corpus-based and discourse-oriented study of Irish news texts. In undertaking this task, the research examines texts from a key moment in the history of Irish journalism, namely the decade between the end of ← 1 | 2 → the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (1895–1905). Instead of conducting a broad survey of Irish news over the span of these ten years, however, the study primarily concentrates the attention on a single issue in the press of the age, that is, the representation of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of the country. As we will see in more detail later on, this is consistent with the intellectual climate generated by the Irish Revival at the turn of the century.