Seamus O’Fawkes and other characters

Abstract

On 8 March 1973, the violence of Belfast spread to the streets of London as the IRA launched their bombing campaign in England. This article examines the cartoon coverage of IRA bomb attacks on English cities published in the British press during the early 1970s. By investigating political cartoons from leading national newspapers, this article sheds new light on reactions to the violence and explores how this affected the lived experiences of the Irish in Britain. It highlights how newspapers used symbols of Britishness and WWII iconography to (re)construct an imagined British community in the face of the IRA threat. The cartoons also indicate a more ambiguous image of the Irish in Britain, one of both harbourers and victims of terrorists. This focus on pictorial representations reveals the complexity of press attitudes towards IRA bombings as the humour inherent in cartoons enables them to allude to ideas journalists could not.