Abstract
This chapter examines the presence of Islamophobia in the context of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by analysing the cyber-discourse representation of Muslim communities in connection with the two most practised religions, Catholicism and Protestantism. The study is based on the analysis of a main corpus made up of 3250 tweets retrieved from Twitter and corresponding to the period 2010–2014. Using critical discourse analysis as the theoretical framework and corpus linguistics as the methodology, the authors analyse how the relations among the three religious groups are reshaped in the island’s new multicultural society and how concepts such as ‘Irishness’, ‘friend’, ‘enemy’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘marginalisation’ take on different and variable meanings.
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Notes
- 1.
These have included attacks on mosques, and numerous incidents of hate speech like the anonymous threatening letter sent to a number of Muslim organisations, schools and mosques in 2013, or the controversial speech by Pastor James McConnell against Islam and its followers in 2014. See Pattison (2013) and Williamson (2014).
- 2.
See also King-O’Riain (2007). In the post-Celtic Tiger years, economic decline and rising unemployment have reduced the flow of immigrants, as well as increased the rate of out-migration. However, the majority of these out-migrants have been either Irish nationals or citizens of new EU accession and member states (Tyrrell et al. 2011, p. xiv).
- 3.
As of 2017, the number of active users is estimated to be more than 300 million.
- 4.
Topsy.com was a search engine for social posts and content shared mainly on Twitter and Google Plus. However, the service <www.topsy.com> is no longer available, since it closed down on 16 December 2015.
- 5.
Capital letters in the tweets are original. Italic words are ours, emphasised to prove some points.
- 6.
In January 2016, Pastor McConnell was cleared by the court of the charge of insulting Islam (Sherwood 2016).
- 7.
This tweet could also be interpreted as ironic. Irony in written language (and especially in social media as in this case) is very difficult to detect, due to the lack of some of the linguistic clues we have in spoken language like facial gestures or voice modulation. We opted to interpret the tweet in the most frequent communicative case (i.e. not ironic).
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Azeez, A.H., Aguilera-Carnerero, C. (2018). The Cyber-Discourse of Inclusion and Marginalisation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Muslims in Ireland and Northern Ireland on Twitter 2010–2014. In: Villar-Argáiz, P. (eds) Irishness on the Margins. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74567-1_10
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