“Ireland for the Irish”

Far-Right Populism and Geopolitical Imaginaries of Ireland on Social Media during the 2020 Irish General Election

Abstract

This article argues that the political campaigning on Twitter of two far-right parties during the 2020 Irish General Election worked to disseminate far-right populist tendencies through their discursive use of conservative geopolitical imaginaries of Ireland. The material harvested for this study consists of 631 original tweets posted by the official Twitter accounts of The National Party and the Irish Freedom Party during the period of January 14 – February 8 2020. Using thematic analysis, this article argues that much of the Twitter content of these two parties centred around three central themes: anti-establishment, anti-immigration, and evoking Irish history. Uniquely, permeating all four themes of the political parties’ accounts are discourses of “patriotism” which configure much of their social media rhetoric as part of an “Ireland for the Irish” geopolitical imaginary. From this analysis, we argue that the National Party and Irish Freedom Party not only disseminated their nationally-specific far-right agendas in their tweets during the 2020 General Election, but that they did so through using geopolitical imaginaries and rhetoric that are reminiscent of far-right populist movements more broadly across Europe and the US in order to rationalise their movement and legitimise their conservative geopolitical imaginaries of Ireland.