At the hands of the Brothers: a corpus-based lexico-grammatical analysis of stance in newspaper reporting of child sexual abuse (Pre-published version)

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, the Irish people were confronted with a series of scandalous revelations about clergy and religious in Ireland; starting with the discovery that Eamonn Casey, while Bishop of Kerry, had fathered a child, through the scandals of child sexual abuse by priests and brothers to the present day investigation into religious-run industrial schools. All of these events have been covered in great detail by the Irish media. This article examines one specific dimension of media coverage of those events – the representation of the Industrial Schools run by the Irish Christian Brothers, and the Brothers themselves.