New Irish in the News

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS selected findings from the ‘Media for Diversity and Migrant Integration’ project (hereafter MEDIVA), a European Union funded project involving six Member States (Ireland, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and the UK), which aimed to assess the capacity of media to reflect the increasing ethnocultural diversity of European societies. The specific focus of the project was on Third Country Nationals (TNCs) or persons without European Union citizenship. In this article we present the project’s content findings for Ireland, focusing specifically on representations of TNCs in a range of national print and broadcast outlets. The media’s contribution to promoting more inclusive societies can be understood in terms of at least four interrelated roles: (i) promoting fair and polyphonic representations; (ii) presenting balanced portrayals of migration-related issues; (iii) engaging immigrants as media professionals (e.g. as journalists and spokespersons), and; (iv) raising awareness amongst media professionals and audiences about inequality and discrimination suffered by immigrants (MEDIVA Policy Brief, 2012: 1). In view of these broad (normative) roles the MEDIVA project had a number of distinct aims, foremost of which was to generate a set of media monitoring ‘indicators’ that could be used to assess different media in different states across four (diversity) dimensions: media content; recruitment/employment; news making/programme production and; training. In essence therefore the project attempted to interrelate media representations and production systems so that an overall score could be generated for any given media outlet. The timing of the MEDIVA project also warrants mention as this project was undertaken during a period in which European social cohesion policies were severely tested (and are still being tested) by an acute economic crisis. Like in many Member States, governmental emphasis on migration-related issues has diminished in Ireland, witnessed by the under-resourcing (and indeed folding) of a number of NGOs and pressure groups.1 The MEDIVA project is therefore important insofar as it bucks a discernable trend during the years of economic crisis to shift away from migration-related research. In what follows we examine the project’s content findings for Ireland. First, however, we present a brief historical overview of migration to Ireland, followed by a theoretical elaboration of media representation.