Activist Media, Social Media and Mediated Republican Deviance in the Northern Irish Peace Process

Abstract

The Northern Irish Peace Process has coincided with the development of the Internet and social media as platforms of communication. Irish republicans, with a history of marginalisation from the political mainstream, have always developed keen instincts for exploiting countercultural spaces for communications purposes. From pamphlets and countercultural newspapers, republicans have used Samizdat-style publishing while suffering the effects of media bans and suppression by the British and Irish states. The age of the Internet would be no different: Sinn Féin harnessed the Internet to develop a far-reaching policy base and dissenting republicans, like those on the Blanket magazine, used the net to articulate critiques of Sinn Féin’s era-defining reforms of republican catechism. Other dissenting republican parties used the net as a space in which to articulate a new dogma of anti-corporatism in the midst of the chaos caused by the collapse of the short-lived neoliberal economic miracle, the Celtic Tiger. Dissident republicans also used the net to reiterate an historic, unreformed, physical force nationalism that had changed little since the early twentieth century. However, the net also became a counter-surveillance force which allowed citizen journalists to gather evidence against those dissidents and their murderous deviance.