Political Language as a Flexible Friend: Irish Parliamentary Debate on the Iraq War

Abstract

This article focuses on the contest that defined Irish political discourses on the Iraq war (2003). It supplies a different angle to current research on international political discourses on the war, as Ireland’s official position diverged from that adopted by pro‐war governments (e.g. Britain, Spain, Eastern European states and Australia) and anti‐war governments (e.g. France, Germany and Russia). This position was a more nuanced, or ambivalent, one that neither explicitly supported nor opposed the US–British decision to launch the war in March 2003. Principally, this article presents a discourse analysis of the session of Dáil Éireann on 20 March 2003 which debated the controversial government decision to provide over‐flight and landing facilities to the US military during the war. This analysis traces the ways in which both government and opposition parliamentary actors sought to achieve resonances between their arguments and historically‐established ‘master frames’ of Irish foreign policy. This practice of constructing frame resonances emerges as a pivotal ideological resource relied upon by parliamentary actors to win the argument regarding Ireland’s response to the Iraq crisis.