“To be Irish, gay, and on the outside”

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed very important economic and legislative changes in the Republic of Ireland, which have contributed to both the reinforcement of national beliefs, and the restructuring of traditional values as well as social practices. In this context, the tendency for some extremist groups to attack minorities such as Asians or Eastern Europeans, along with the allegedly institutionalised exclusion of Travellers, contrasts very much with a slowly but increasingly overall positive perception of an already marginalised group such as the LGBT community. Bearing the latter in mind, in this paper we aim to reveal how otherness is represented in the Irish print media, and the extent to which more or less discriminatory viewpoints are reinforced in the public domain. In particular, we concentrate on the discursive construction of gayness, and the potential homophobic imagery veiled and revealed in a corpus of newspaper articles from the last years of, and after, the so-called Celtic Tiger era. To do this, the detection of topoi will be combined with metaphor analysis.