1st Edition
Media Connections between Britain and Ireland Shared Histories
This book examines the relationship between Britain and Ireland, specifically the central role played by print and broadcast media in communicating political, cultural, and social differences and similarities between the two islands.
The relationship between Ireland and Great Britain has a long and complex history. Given their geographical proximity and shared language one key dimension of this relationship has been the communication media – print and electronic – that have mediated this relationship. This book addresses this important, but relatively neglected, topic at a critical time in Anglo-Irish relations. Taking the long view, as well as looking in detail at specific episodes, the contributors map British-Irish interactions in print and broadcast media. This volume assesses the proprietorial and journalistic connections between various media institutions, the conditions under which media organisations operated and distribution channels employed. It considers media influences in terms of the role of media organs in constructing national identity and promoting social change. Furthermore, this book also considers news flows between the two islands, censorship in times of conflict, cross-border influences of television, and the relationship between cinema and television.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.
Introduction
Mark O’Brien
1. Oscar Wilde, Anglo-Irish networks of print and the cultural politics of needlework
Mark W. Turner
2. The convict Kirwan: Viewing the nineteenth-century press through the lens of an Irish murder trial
Abigail Rieley
3. Image wars: the Edwardian picture postcard and the construction of Irish identity in the early 1900s
Ann Wilson
4. Scissors and Paste: Arthur Griffiths’s use of British and other media to circumvent censorship in Ireland 1914–15
Colum Kenny
5. Fighting and writing: Journalists and the 1916 Easter Rising
Mark O’Brien
6. Censorship and suppression of the Irish provincial press, 1914–1921
Christopher Doughan
7. ‘A bit of news which you may, or may not, care to use’: The Beaverbrook-Healy friendship and British newspapers 1922–1931
Elspeth Payne
8. Tuned out? A study of RTÉ’s Radio 1 programmes Dear Frankie/Women Today and BBC 4’s Woman’s Hour
Finola Doyle-O’Neill
9. Television and the decline of cinema-going in Northern Ireland, 1953–1963
Sam Manning
10. Memories of television in Ireland: Separating media history from nation state
Edward Brennan
11. Seamus O’Fawkes and other characters: The British tabloid cartoon coverage of the IRA campaign in England
Roseanna Doughty
12. ‘More difficult from Dublin than from Dieppe’: Ireland and Britain in a European network of communication
Yann Ciarán Ryan
Biography
Mark O’Brien is Associate Professor of Journalism History at Dublin City University, Ireland. He is the author of The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2017); The Irish Times: A History (2008); and De Valera, Fianna Fáil and the Irish Press: The Truth in the News (2001).
