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Constructing The Social In The Fiscal: A Discourse Analysis Of Irish Budget Speeches (1970-2015), Ewan Alexander Macdonald

Doctoral

Budget speeches are important discursive institutional practices in which fiscal and monetary policy are presented to parliaments on an annual basis. The issue of ideology and the contingent nature of discourse is rarely considered with budgets delivered in specific policy contexts presented as pragmatic truth statements unhindered by the distorting lens of ideology. Employing contributions from post-structural discourse theory, dialogism, critical realism and corpus linguistics this thesis addresses three research questions: what discourses are employed in Irish budget speeches from 1970 to 2015? How are these discourses structured? How are social imaginaries and subject positions constructed through these discourses? Methods …