“We have weathered the Omicron storm…”: A case study on the argumentative use of metaphor in Ireland’s political discourse on Covid-19

This paper is aimed at zooming in on and reconstructing the metaphors that took centre stage in the Republic of Ireland’s political discourse on Covid-19. The study is based on a small corpus of addresses to the nation by Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin, the two Taoisigh in office over the past two years. The qualitative, data-driven analysis of the speeches provides evidence of metaphorical arguments, where metaphors such as ‘war’ and ‘journey’ can be observed to be part of propositions of policy or propositions of value that make a substantial contribution to underpinning the argumentation.