The Memification of the Northern Ireland Conflict

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Martin Lundqvist, whose interest is in the use of memes in the Northern Ireland conflict, where riots continue to occur with ‘monotonous regularity’, as a local judge recently pointed out. How do online memes engage with these continuing troubles? While we know much about meme culture overall, there is considerably less research on their role in such contexts of continuing post-war violence. Can they also speak to peace-building processes?

While the Northern Ireland peace process has progressed considerably, there are still deep divisions and significant segregation between the two communities. In their appeal to humour, memes may respond in a variety of ways to this situation, possibly also to defuse some of these tensions. The present study engaged in digital ethnography and the tracking of online content related to recent riots.

Such memes – relating to a riot over the removal of the UK flag from City Hall – drew for instance on content from Father Ted, the Liam Neeson film series Taken, or TV contests (rating the riots against others elsewhere in the world); they also draw humorously on stereotypes about the Troubles.

There are two dominant meme styles here: one is to poke fun at the violence; the other normalises them. These are also interrelated and can occur together. It should not be forgotten here that for people in Belfast these riots are deeply traumatic – laughing at them through memes can thus help them cope with the events as well. Further exploration with the audiences for those memes is necessary to better understand how they work in practice.