Book review: Giuseppe Balirano, Gardaí and Badfellas, The Discursive Construction of Organized Crime in the Irish Media

While criminal organisations have been mainly studied in the field of jurisprudence, highlighting the legal aspects of this phenomenon, relatively few studies have been devoted to the discursive construction of crime syndicates. In this book, Giuseppe Balirano fills this gap with an exploration of the ideological construal of the Irish organised crime syndicate in Irish media discourse(s). Media have always represented a window on the world, a filter that allows people to make sense of reality. This sense-making quality, however, entails specific construals of how events and actors must be interpreted, judged or understood. On the basis of this assumption, the focus of this book is on critically unfolding the ideological motivations behind particular representations of Irish criminal organisations. Combining a variety of methodologies and approaches, Balirano studies how the principal actors involved in criminal activities in the Republic of Ireland are constructed in different media genres.