Political Language as a Flexible Friend

Irish Parliamentary Debate on the Iraq War

Bibliographic Data

ID6074532
AuthorsMary O’regan (Dublin City University, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume25
Issue1
Pages1-21
Publication date2010-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIrish Political Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0790-7184 • E-ISSN: 1743-9078
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07907180903431913
OpenAlexW2057022240
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited45

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

Coalition government · CONTEST · Foreign policy · Frame analysis · Ideology · Irish · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Irish and British Studies · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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