Abstract

This paper examines media coverage of one local authority housing estate in Dublin city with a difficult past. Fatima Mansions was built in the late 1940s and enjoyed an unremarkable history up until the 1970s. A heroin problem developed in the estate in the 1980s and contributed to its negative media construction. Beginning at the end of the 1990s and continuing to the present, a regeneration project worked hard to dislodge earlier interpretations of the estate. A qualitative analysis of different media spaces that represented this change process shows how the media tuned into it and that earlier negative meaning-making in the late 1990s was later displaced by visual imagery, audio recordings and textual accounts with a more positive valence. The paper argues that media representations of social problems may not be authoritative and media agenda-setting is more provisional and open-ended than is commonly assumed.