“The Familiar Style of Decaying Colonial Powers”: Irish National Newspapers and Portugal’s Colonial Wars, 1961-1974

Abstract

The early stages of Salazar’s Estado Novo regime in Portugal, between the 1933 constitution and the end of World War II, raised a lot of attention in Ireland as well as in other countries. Salazar’s solutions to Portugal’s economic and financial crisis were then widely considered as potential solution to many of Ireland’s problems. Progressively, however, Ireland lost interest in the Portuguese situation and paid little attention to the evolution of Salazar’s dictatorship until the late 1950s in such a way that when colonial wars broke out in Portuguese African territories in the early 1960s, de Valera’s Ireland and Salazar’s Portugal had been drifting apart for over a decade. More importantly, Portugal’s determination to cling to its colonies, causing the country’s isolation on the international scene, went against what the Irish Nation essentially stood for. The objective of this article is to consider the coverage by Ireland’s three main newspapers – Irish Independent, Irish Press and Irish Times – of Portugal’s colonialist policies between 1961 and the fall of the dictatorship in April 1974.