IN DEFENSE OF PROPAGANDA: THE REPUBLICAN RESPONSE TO STATE CREATED NARRATIVES WHICH SILENCED POLITICAL SPEECH DURING THE NORTHERN IRISH CONFLICT, 1968-1998 A thesis presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with a Degree of Bachelor of Science in Journalism By Selina Nadeau April 2017 1 This thesis is approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Journalism Dr. Aimee Edmondson Professor, Journalism Thesis Adviser Dr. Bernhard Debatin Director of Studies, Journalism Dr. Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College 2 Table of Contents 1. History 2. Literature Review 2.1. Reframing the Conflict 2.2.Scholarship about Terrorism in Northern Ireland 2.3.Media Coverage of the Conflict 3. Theoretical Frameworks 3.1.Media Theory 3.2.Theories of Ethnic Identity and Conflict 3.3.Colonialism 3.4.Direct rule 3.5.British Counterterrorism 4. Research Methods 5. Researching the Troubles 5.1.A student walks down the Falls Road 6. Media Censorship during the Troubles 7. Finding Meaning in the Posters from the Troubles 7.1.Claims of Abuse of State Power 7.1.1. Social, political or economic grievances 7.1.2. Criticism of Government Officials 7.1.3. Criticism of the police, army or security forces 7.1.4. Criticism of media or censorship of media 7.2.Calls for Peace 7.2.1. Calls for inclusive all-party peace talks 7.2.2. British withdrawal as the solution 7.3.Appeals to Rights, Freedom, or Liberty 7.3.1. Demands of the Civil Rights Movement 7.3.2. The Right to Self-Determination 7.3.3. Against Imprisonment and Internment without Trial 7.4.Calls for Justice or Legal Redress 7.4.1. Calls for Inquiry into Wrongful Death 7.5.Calls for Resistance or Civil Disobedience 7.6.Explanation of Findings 8. Conclusion 9. Glossary of Terms 10. Bilbiography 3 The day is May 12, 1981, just after 6 p.m. and the streets of West Belfast are alive with the roar of protest. People are running in the streets, yelling. Others are trying to get to safety as security forces in riot gear march among civilians periodically handcuffing people and hauling them away. An all too common sight in the streets of Belfast, young men, some barely older than 14, sprint about solo or in small groups with bricks, large stones and petrol bombs in their hands, occasionally hurling them in the direction of anyone wearing a uniform. The rioting increasing across Belfast, Derry and other cities in Northern Ireland, as well as in the independent nation south of its somewhat contested border, has been going on for seven days since the death of republican leader, hunger strike organizer, and recently elected member of British Parliament, Bobby Sands. Today, however, the frenzied people on the streets near the entrance to Divis Tower, an apartment building that lost its top two floors to British Army snipers and lookouts, have a new reason to be angry. News has just reached the largest Catholic neighborhood in Belfast that IRA member Francis Hughes, a fellow hunger striker, has died after 59 days without food. Hughes and Sands were two of the many republican prisoners on hunger strike. This is the second hunger strike in as many years protesting the withholding by the British government of special political status for people arrested because of their political involvement in the current conflict. The hunger strikes became a very visible form of self-violence, especially when the casualty count from the second hunger strike continued to rise. One young man, who looks no different from the other young men throwing stones, runs down the street toward the base of Divis Tower, throwing his head angrily up in the direction of the soldiers at the top. His pockets empty of the stones and bricks that most people were using as weapons, the young man brandishes an automatic weapon, a 4 gun likely a loan from the Irish National Liberation Army, an organization similar to the Irish Republican Army to which he claims membership. The young man begins to fire wildly up at the post almost 200 feet above him. There is no indication that his bullets are reaching their target, or that they are even being noticed, at least until fire is returned. A hail of bullets hit the sidewalk, several of them becoming buried in the young man’s chest, causing him to fall to the ground. His wounds are severe, but he is eventually put into an ambulance, with the help of some of his family members, including his youngest brothers who have been experiencing the rioting for months and likely have thrown a few stones themselves. Getting through the rioting is difficult enough, but, as happened frequently during the worst of the violence in Northern Ireland, the ambulance is stopped, searched and made to wait for security forces and others before it can reach the hospital. The young man dies inside the ambulance, the image of his bloodied clothes and angry, black machine gun still clutched by his crimson-stained hands the last his family would ever have.1 As the title of this thesis indicates, the subject of this original research might be discounted immediately, despite the “defense” that will be laid out in the following pages. Still, the goal of this research is to illuminate, with the help of scholars who have made similar attempts to circumvent a dominant narrative of the conflict, a largely unnoticed, but organized effort by a marginalized group to make their voices heard. Trying to grasp the effect that the conflict had for the people who lived there is nearly 1 Megan Deirdre Roy, “Divis Flats: The Social and Political Implications of a Modern Housing Project in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1968-1998,” Iowa Historical Review, (University of Iowa, 2007), 11. Details were added to illustrate, based on the account of this day told to the researcher during a conversation in Belfast in January 2017 with the victim’s brother, which will be summarized later in this thesis. The summary of the events of May 12, 1981, including the information gained from discussion in Belfast is accurate. 5 impossible, this researcher would argue, without visiting the streets. In my research, I have noticed a similar trend among scholars of this conflict. I suspect this trend is simply the result of timing—in the last several decades, it has been very safe to travel to Northern Ireland, and staying in Belfast doesn’t feel like living in a conflict zone the way it might have throughout the 1970s. Yet, the immediacy of the conflict is jarring, not only because so many people alive today, many barely forty years old, remember the conflict’s bloodiest days, but also because the scars of the conflict are still visible on brick walls and the sides of buildings. People have kept the memory of the conflict alive, and they share it. It is for those reasons that so many scholars who have written about the conflict in Northern Ireland begin by explaining how they found this subject and how they came to learn about it. For the next several decades, some of the best sources of information on the conflict will be the living memories of those who experienced it, so it will continue to entice scholars to slip into first person as they try to grapple with the plethora of subjective information that reveals so much about a complicated subject. Clifford Christians and James Carey articulated the benefits of cultural understanding in research, arguing that “the interpretative process is not mysterious flashes of lightning as much as intimate submersion into actual traditions, beliefs, languages, and practices.”2 So, this researcher will do the same, in a later section. First, I will briefly explain the aims and methods of this thesis. 2 Bonnie S. Brennen, Qualitative Research Methods for Media Studies (New York: Routledge, 2013), 22. Cites Clifford Christians and James Carey, “The logic and aims of qualitative research,” in Research methods in mass communication, ed. by Guido H. Stempel et al. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), 363. 6 The primary question driving this research asks what political messages can be interpreted from what the mainstream narrative of the Troubles3 defined as republican propaganda. A secondary question ponders whether the censorship of reporting about the Troubles achieved the goals that the British government espoused when it tightened its grip on the media. Subsequent questions driving this research ponder the legitimacy of both the mainstream narrative of the conflict and the political content of the original documents to be analyzed, taking the social and political realities of the Troubles into account. This thesis argues that the failure of the mass media to accurately cover the conflict was met by a sufficient supplementary response from republican political organizers who utilized alternative forms of communication. Specifically, this is a study of more than 3,000 posters that have been collected at the Linen Hall Library’s Troubled Images collection in Belfast, Ireland. These posters are artifacts of the alternative communications that were circulated during the years of the conflict. 1. History One cannot adequately study the Troubles without looking back at the history between Britain and Ireland that has led to the contestation of one small section of the Irish island. Irish history is full of rebellion and argument and bloody struggles, the most famous of which was the 1916 Easter Rising Rebellion in Dublin. A group of rebels who called themselves the Irish Volunteers took to the streets, shooting British soldiers and 3 The Troubles is a name used to refer to the violence in Northern Ireland beginning in the late 1960s and largely ending in the late 1990s when the peace treaty was signed.