The “most compact 5,196 square miles of back-lot in the world”: Northern Ireland, propaganda, rebranding and the media

Abstract

From its creation under the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, Northern Ireland has struggled to achieve the sort of cultural integrity that would underscore an imagined community and functioning democracy. Initially beset by the imaginative exclusiveness of Ulster unionists, at whose insistence Northern Ireland exists, it is also subject to the competing discourse of Irish nationalism that seeks its dissolution and reunification with the rest of the island. On top of this, the British state, engaged in a determined propaganda war during the conflict that broke out in the late 1960s. The subsequent peace process brought strenuous efforts to persuade for peace, reconciliation and an incorporation proper into the global free market. Now with the achievement of political accord, Northern Ireland’s devolved government is concerned to promote the region around the global as an attractive site for capital accumulation. The article seeks to periodise this history into three main interpretive frameworks employed in the media – the propaganda of war, the propaganda of peace and the commercial rebranding of Northern Ireland. It argues that these dominant ways of thinking about and seeing Northern Ireland have rendered the region culturally unimaginable, lacking what Benedict Anderson refers to as “emotional legitimacy”.