Constructing Irish Republicanism in Social Media

Analyses the discourses at play in the digital spaces of Irish republican politics, highlighting how republican social media users negotiated their ideology and identity in response to the movement’s integration into mainstream politics

This book examines the discursive construction of Irish republicanism’s political modernisation through social media during Sinn Féin’s integration into mainstream politics in Ireland, following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. It focuses on the crucial role grassroots republican social media users played in negotiating this transformation, despite the movement’s legacy of exclusion from mainstream media and the public sphere in the wake of the Troubles. Providing an unprecedented analysis of the construction of Irish republican ideology and identity facilitated by social media, Goulding examines how the Irish republican community consolidated online, how republican social media users engage with day-to-day politics, and how republicanism has filtrated into mainstream virtual spaces of Irish society.
Adopting an approach rooted in critical discourse studies, the author employs various tools, from corpus linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, and concepts from (social) media studies and political communication, to analyse case studies of virtual sites of Irish republican discourse. Drawing on internet fora, Facebook meme pages, and Twitter (X) hashtags, he explains the ways in which these sites serve as spaces for the reproduction of internal hierarchical power in the republican movement, and the external reproduction of a (counter) hegemonic, nationalist discourse, that seeks to alter the fabric of Irish politics.
Constructing Irish Republicanism in Social Media provides invaluable insights into how grassroots republican social media users, known as ‘Shinnerbots’, have become a potent force in Irish political communication today.