In Ireland, the extension of rights to same-sex citizen couples coexists with the restriction of rights to transnational heterosexual couples. This article contrasts dual constructions of materially motivated marriages as a celebration of national belonging and threat to national integrity. Drawing on twenty-eight texts from the Irish press, it analyses the discursive construction of a tax-motivated marriage by two Irish citizen men in 2017, dubbed ‘the marriage of convenience with love at its heart’, with materially interested unions between heterosexual couples that include a non-citizen spouse. It critically analyses the discursive construction of tax-motivated marriage by same-sex, male citizens as heart-warming, while materially similarly unions between heterosexual couples that include a non-citizen spouse are pathologised and discursively criminalised. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s conception of the ‘pure relationship’, this article problematizes how instrumental (impure) marriages can be accepted and even embraced in public discourse. The findings demonstrate that the embrace of the ‘impure marriage’ is not merely about emotional authenticity or material intent. Rather, it reflects and reproduces hierarchies of race, nationhood and belonging. By doing so, it challenges the conflation between purity with disinterest and illegitimacy with instrumentality, by emphasising how citizenship, nationhood, and sexuality mediate the construction of marital legitimacy. This seeks to move beyond the binary of ‘pure’ versus ‘instrumental’ marriage, revealing how (im)purity itself is differentially constructed, applied, and policed.
Stephanie Hanlon (2025) studied this question.