“If you want Ireland to prosper...”: A discourse-analytic study of Irishness in advertising from the 1930s

Context has been described as a multifaceted and multivalent concept. As such, it has been discussed from various perspectives. Against this backdrop, the primary aim of this study is to focus on the relationship between context and the production/reception of news texts, by looking at advertisements published in Irish newspapers of the 1930s. The study was based on a corpus of 373 ads. These were retrieved as a result of a random search of the first 100 from the 1932 issues of the Irish Free State national newspapers included in the Irish News Archives, the world’s largest and oldest online database of Irish newspapers. From a methodological point of view, the study was carried out within the broad framework of historical discourse analysis. As the ads in the corpus underwent manual investigation, the analysis was a primarily qualitative one. Overall, the corpus ads draw the analyst’s attention to four interrelated strategies. The first strategy lay in the sustained effort to promote Irish-made goods and services. The second was the invitation, or more appropriately the strong recommendation to choose Irish products instead of their foreign counterparts. The third strategy was represented by the association of quality and Irishness. The fourth and last one involved the attempt to connect goods or services with a reaffirmation of allegedly national values. The brief account of strategies and rhetorical tools provided in the study serves the purpose of highlighting how the context of early 1930s Ireland moulded news advertising into a platform of Irish nationalism at various levels.