Terror on Display: Irish Terrorism and the British Media in the 1870s and the 1970s

Within the fields of British and Irish studies, scholars of terrorism conventionally limit their topic to the violence of secret, close-knit organizations who commit such acts for avowedly nationalist or loyalist political purposes. Hence the extensive literature on the Fenian movement of the 1860s, the Irish-American dynamiters of the 1880s, and the troubled history of the Irish Republican Army and assorted loyalist paramilitaries in the twentieth century.

This paper, by contrast, draws upon the conference theme “Historical Scale: Linking Levels of Experience” to argue that we can create a more sophisticated historiography of terrorism by exploring this topic across spatial and temporal scales. Emerging from a larger project on British engagement with terrorism from 1870 to the present, both in the UK and across the globe, this paper focuses specifically on terrorism related to Irish affairs. It compares the press coverage of Irish terrorism in the 1870s with media representations of I.R.A. violence in the 1970s to show, first and foremost, how the meaning of the very word “terrorism” changed over time and according to its shifting locations in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Britain. In the 1870s, for example, the British press described Irish terrorism in gendered terms, as a threat to Irish manliness and domesticity, in order to define terrorism as a social rather than a political menace. By the 1970s Irish terrorism was seen in more explicitly political terms and was lumped together with such domestic and international threats to British democratic government as trade union agitation, communism, and international terrorism.

More than this: linking different time scales also points up historical continuities, in particular the importance of colonialism to the way British media made sense of terrorism; the way British government crafted counter-terror legislation; and the expansive way in which “terrorism” encompassed both violent and non-violent action.