In a 2018 referendum, the Irish public voted to lift the Irish state's near-total constitutional ban on abortion, bucking a recent global trend towards restrictions on reproductive rights. While abortion rights have long been a major concern of Irish feminists, appeals to national identity have often been viewed with suspicion by the women's rights movement in Ireland due to the historic role of national identity construction in perpetuating gender-based inequalities. This article explores the way(s) in which discourses of Irish identity and gender were mediated by the use of Irish in the linguistic landscape (LL) at the time of the vote. Proposing a modified version of Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle, I argue that signs use Irish as both a means of stancetaking and as an object of stance in itself, thus effectively taking a stance on both the referendum and on Irish national identity, indexed by the language. (Stancetaking, Irish (language), national identity, gender, abortion, Eighth Amendment)

This paper offers an analysis of a British government publicity campaign during the third national lockdown, which began in England in January 2021. When it came to enforcing lockdown rules, the government’s messaging in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) and elsewhere focused on individualising responsibility for the pandemic. This framing favoured the political interests of the government by apportioning blame for the highest death toll in Europe to the British public’s reckless behaviour, which conveniently elides the government’s own role in the crisis. Drawing on data from social media and the LL, I analyse the publicity campaign according to a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach, taking into account the multiple semiotic systems employed to communicate the campaign’s underlying neoliberal ideology.

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In May 2018, voters in the Republic of Ireland passed a referendum proposal to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, lifting the Irish state’s near-total ban on abortion. Scholars have argued that Ireland’s abortion ban has historically played a key role in the construction of Irish national identity along Catholic, traditional, and heteronormative lines, meaning the lead-up to the vote allowed for key insights into the discursive construction of national identity and gender in Ireland. Drawing on theoretical discussions in both the nationalism and Linguistic Landscape (LL) literature and adopting a qualitative, multimodal approach to analyse the referendum campaign’s LL, I argue that there was a dominant understanding of the relationship between women and Irish national identity, predicated on a positive stance towards Irish identity, while any dissenting voices which questioned whether advancing gender equality was compatible with nationalist ideology were confined to the margins of the debate.

While the Irish language has long been closely tied to Irish national identity and political nationalism, it has also been strongly associated with the perceived rural, traditional lifestyle of those regions where it remains the everyday community language. These associations have been disrupted with the emergence of Kneecap, bilingual (Irish/English) rappers from West Belfast whose lyrics and visual imagery contain sexual innuendo, references to illicit drug-taking and the IRA, jokes at the expense of the police (P.S.N.I.) and established political parties (notably the Democratic Unionist Party), as well as calling for Irish reunification and an end to the British presence on the island of Ireland. We draw on a theoretical framework which integrates "everyday nationhood"how "ordinary citizens" perform nationalism in everyday lifewith Banerjee's "muscular nationalism", which draws attention to the gendered history of Irish Republicanism. Adopting a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to the study of gender and language, we analyse four music videos selfpublished by Kneecap on Youtube. We argue that these everyday texts reproduce and disseminate Irish Republicanism while centring normatively masculine identities, although in a way which sets Kneecap apart from previous incarnations of "muscular nationalism".