‘Ireland’s hidden diaspora’: multimodal stylistic constructions of journey and landscape on the Irish abortion trail

The Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution, which restricted access to abortion in Ireland, was repealed as a result of a referendum in May 2018. The campaigns to secure reproductive rights for women in Ireland, conducted by organisations at home and abroad like Together for Yes and the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign, utilised a wide range of semiotic resources to persuade voters to support repeal. As part of ongoing work into the linguistic strategies of Together for Yes and other groups (Statham & Ringrow, in press), this article analyses campaign videos that were disseminated through the social media platform YouTube. In particular we analyse textual and visual representations of travel, including uses of the JOURNEY metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and apply a critical framework for visual analysis (Ledin & Machin, 2018) to assess how pro-repeal narratives constructed connections between people, country and landscape through image and song lyrics. This article assesses how these campaign videos construct journey and landscape to subvert traditional constructions of the highly emotive concept of the Irish diaspora and how they interact with dominant strategies of the repeal campaign.