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Paramilitary Media (Northern Ireland)

Republicans/Nationalists wanted the region unified with the Irish Republic, and Loyalists/Unionists wanted it to remain part of the United Kingdom; both sides had paramilitary bodies. Each camp ran its own news media, which were significantly different in many respects from more mainstream news media. Between both Loyalist and Republican alternative presses on the one hand, and mainstream media on the other hand, there were three key ideological differences. First, alternative publications contextualized events historically. Second, mainstream news concentrated on the individual's role in the political process, whereas the alternative press insisted on the centrality and agency of “the people.” Third, mainstream news discourse centered on consensus and the resolution of conflict, whereas the alternative press accentuated dissent and the inevitability of conflict.

The paramilitaries or their political allies printed and distributed irregularly, sometimes illegally, newspapers, news sheets, and pamphlets voicing their views. They revealed a very different picture of the conflict and the peace in Northern Ireland. No respecters of objectivity, they spelled out their message in stark terms and freely gave offense. They also displayed at times a remarkable degree of self-denial and some deeply contradictory thinking about political realities.

Yet, such alternative publications—however offensive or illegal—asked difficult questions about the peace process and its optimistic, liberal orientation, questions absent from official public discourse. Even a summary survey of their responses to key moments in the process gives insight into why sectarianism and armed dissent remained as direct challenges to visions of a new and peaceful Northern Ireland.

Two political events had a significant bearing on attitudes to the Northern Ireland peace process. The first event was local, the 1988 “Good Friday Agreement” that created the architecture of a political settlement and a return to regional government for the first time since 1972. The second event was global, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing “war on terror.” How did republican and loyalist print media view these events?

The Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement was signed on April 10, 1998, to international acclaim. Here, it seemed, was a model of conflict resolution that might be applied in other trouble spots around the world. On a local level, there was a remarkable degree of media consensus in support of the agreement. The three regional daily newspapers—the Nationalist Irish News and the Unionist News Letter and Belfast Telegraph all regarded it as an opportunity for Northern Ireland to break from its violent past. The local broadcast media were less explicit but nonetheless underscored the official preference for a political settlement founded on balanced representation.

With only a few exceptions, the alternative presses of Loyalism and Republicanism expressed fundamental opposition to the agreement and rejected mainstream media accounts as little more than official propaganda. A survey of these publications reveals some interesting contradictions and tensions not so much between as within Loyalists and Republicans.

An Phoblacht/Republican News is a weekly, paid-for newspaper that, throughout the conflict in the North, supported the armed campaign of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and subsequently the strategy of Sinn Féin, its political ally, to search for a political rather than military solution. It was no surprise, then, that the paper welcomed the agreement as a “new phase” in the republican struggle. However, other dissident republican publications (e.g., Saoirse) rejected it outright as a “con trick,” and one that merely “restructured British rule in Ireland” (Sovereign Nation).

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