Start Date
5-3-2024 12:30 PM
End Date
5-3-2024 1:45 PM
Disciplines
History
Subjects
Catholic Church -- Ireland, Irish independent (Dublin Ireland), Spain -- History -- Civil War (1936-1939), Fascism
Abstract
In the summer of 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted with a military coup d’etat against the current Republic, launching three years of chaos and casualty. Among the ranks of supporters for the imminent fascist regime were Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and shockingly, the majority of Ireland’s citizens. However, their support was not unprompted. The Irish Independent, a popular newspaper, flooded its pages with gory depictions of anti-clerical violence committed by the Spanish Republicans and steered their audience into the kind of righteous sensationalism that would later inspire an Irish Brigade to form on behalf of the fascist regime. This paper aims to find out what financial and political motives the Irish Independent had to simplify, dramatize, and misrepresent the Spanish conflict to its audience. Particularly, the newspaper’s Catholic-centric narrative points to a manipulation of events in order to gain favor from the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy.
Keywords: Ireland, Spain, Spanish Civil War, Journalism, Fascism, Catholicism
Part of the panel: Identity through Conflict
Moderator: Professor Jennifer Kerns
Creative Commons License or Rights Statement
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41816
Included in
Faithful Coverage: the Irish Independent’s Catholic Transformation of the Spanish Civil War
In the summer of 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted with a military coup d’etat against the current Republic, launching three years of chaos and casualty. Among the ranks of supporters for the imminent fascist regime were Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and shockingly, the majority of Ireland’s citizens. However, their support was not unprompted. The Irish Independent, a popular newspaper, flooded its pages with gory depictions of anti-clerical violence committed by the Spanish Republicans and steered their audience into the kind of righteous sensationalism that would later inspire an Irish Brigade to form on behalf of the fascist regime. This paper aims to find out what financial and political motives the Irish Independent had to simplify, dramatize, and misrepresent the Spanish conflict to its audience. Particularly, the newspaper’s Catholic-centric narrative points to a manipulation of events in order to gain favor from the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy.
Keywords: Ireland, Spain, Spanish Civil War, Journalism, Fascism, Catholicism
Part of the panel: Identity through Conflict
Moderator: Professor Jennifer Kerns