Ireland Belongs to Europe: The Creation of the Euro-Irish National Narrative

Irish support for the EU has remained high (~70%) since the 1990s even as Ireland rejected EU treaties and underwent social, political, and economic ‘transformation’ (Simpson 2019). This paper investigates nationalism’s role in engendering support for the EU beginning in the mid-1990s. As Katy Hayward (2009) maintains, Ireland’s conceptualization of the EU is inseparable from the Irish elite’s production of nationalism. Building upon Hayward, this paper uses discourse analysis and imagined communities to analyze the elite’s discourse on integration and nationalism. This paper finds that the Irish elite produced a Euro-Irish nationalism that lauded integration as the cause of Ireland’s ‘transformation;’ supporting integration became a nationalist act. As Brexit intensifies our need to understand Irish nationalism and Ireland’s role in the EU, this research deepens our understanding of both.