Brexit, the Border and the Unification of Ireland. A Corpus-assisted Analysis of Irish Newspapers

Abstract

This is an analysis of the discourses on Brexit in Irish newspapers. In order to explore such discourses, I built a corpus of newspaper articles on Brexit published in both the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland, in different time spans, namely the period of the June 2016 referendum, the EU/Britain deal of 2020, and the announcement of the Windsor Framework in 2023. My corpus-assisted study aims to critically analyse how issues related to the consequences of Brexit were articulated in newspapers, in order to tease out differences in the language regarding the matter at hand at topical moments. This article primarily addresses key words and phrases related to partition within the corpus (e.g. border poll, hard border, united Ireland), as well as their collocational behaviour. The study investigates key changes in the discourse on both the Irish border and Irish unification during the 2016-2023 period, and considers how possible changes in terminology (e.g. shared island, new Ireland) can be evidence of a new type of discourse about unification that is slowly surfacing.