Ireland used to ban films. Now it’s more relaxed than Britain or the US about what’s on screen. Why?

You may not immediately recognise Dr Ciarán Kissane’s name, but if you are a regular filmgoer you have probably already seen his signature. An agreeable Laois man, Kissane arrived as Ireland’s director of film classification at an interesting time. The Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) – originally the Film Censor’s Office – is, like many institutions of the State, passing through its centenary year. Kissane, who does indeed sign the certification documents that appear before the credits roll, is keen to acknowledge the anniversary.

“That was one of the things I had to look at when I came in, in March,” he says. “The legislation was signed in July of 1923. We were going into the centenary year. And nothing really had been planned, because the office was in transition.”

I wonder if Kissane would admit a dilemma. For most of its existence – right until the dawn of the 21st century – the film-censorship body brought little glory to the nation. Such shocking films as Brief Encounter and The Big Sleep were banned. Much of the romance was cut from Casablanca. The Graduate was initially banned, then released in a version that largely concealed Mrs Robinson’s seduction of Benjamin. As late as the 1990s, films such as Natural Born Killers and From Dusk to Dawn were prohibited. Commemoration is not the same as celebration, but this is a tricky brief for Kissane.

“You’re right,” he says. “I talked to a lot of people about it. There is that sense of the history of the organisation, but also of its evolution. I think you can’t ignore the past. But it is also about giving it a fair reflection.”

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As part of his researches, he looked into the annual report that the censor – more recently “classification officer” – sent back to the minister.

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“It gives voice to the office. At different times the office-holder was critical of the treatment they were getting in the press, but they felt they weren’t able to respond because they were part of the Department of Justice.”

We won’t go over the whole grim history. It is all there in Kevin Rockett’s seminal book Irish Film Censorship. But suffice to say the office changed with the times. Quite suddenly in one instance. John Kelleher, appointed as Kissane’s predecessor in 2003, exchanged the word “censorship” for “classification” and shook the priestly shadows free. The scissors were put back in the drawer. Banning largely became a thing of the past. The office began talking to the people.

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“Conversation is very important in terms of informing both the individual decisions we make but also in terms of a review of our guidelines next year, which haven’t been reviewed in about 15 years,” Kissane says. “We will get public input on those.”

Kissane knows whereof he speaks. He has been in regulation for 25 years. He started at the Independent Radio and Television Commission – the organisation that became the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland and then the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, before being replaced, this year, by Coimisiún na Meán – doing much work on broadcasting codes and their implementation.

When the IFCO job came up, he felt that it was in the “same space” and that he had developed the appropriate skills. In truth, the job is not quite the hot potato it once was. The public seems relatively relaxed about the liberalisation of film censorship. Nobody wants to cut the dirty bits out of The Graduate again.

“Not having lived through those years, I don’t feel best placed to comment on the extent to which the public were on board with the vision of censorship – or how the public were on board with the general vision about how society should be run,” he says. “There are different views about the extent to which the political class and the government reflected or were shaping what’s on the ground.”

Very cautious. A professional to his fingertips, Kissane is happier to point to research than to venture grand opinions on the IFCO as an expression of the nation’s collective morality. But there is something to that theory. John Kelleher, at the time still new to the job, went on The Late Late Show after passing Michael Winterbottom’s hugely explicit 9 Songs in 2004. The purse-mouths must have then known the game was up. Only a few in the audience mustered an objection.

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Our classifiers now regularly skew more liberally than their British or US counterparts. Take the fascinating recent case of Ira Sachs’s Passages. The intense, furiously acted sexual drama was granted a rare, economically ruinous NC-17 certificate in the United States. (The distributor eventually elected to release it without a cert.) It got an 18 from the British Board of Film Classification. Here it went out with a mere 16.

“I would look at the number of complaints we get,” Kissane says. “People are not generally coming back to us and saying, ‘You’re way out of kilter with where society is at.’ So that suggests to me that we’re making the call in the right way. Whether our decisions on particular films are a larger social bellwether, I will leave to others to determine.”

I wonder if he can now see the circumstances in which he would fail to grant a certificate to a feature, so effectively banning it.

“I suppose the legislation says it is possible,” Kissane replies. “So I can’t say it definitely never would happen. The only situation that I could currently see, in principle, would be if something was illegal.”

He means if there was evidence of illegal activity in the film’s creation?

“Yes. If there was something that was in breach of the law,” he says. “There is content out there that is illegal in other spaces. I think that would definitely be a line. Beyond that, in principle, I think the idea that adults over 18 should be free to make their own decisions is a good one. And we have had very few over-18s [certificates] since I have started. We have never had a conversation about banning anything. I can’t say never, but I find it hard to see that situation.”

He mentions “in other spaces”. Here we get to a real challenge for the IFCO. Kissane is keen to stress his organisation’s “advisory” role. Rather than stopping people from going to see films, he and his colleagues are largely there to inform the public about potentially challenging content.

Yet theatrical exhibition is just about the only area of audiovisual content where meaningful legal restrictions are placed on who can view what. You won’t receive an angry letter if you show an 18-cert DVD to your 17-year-old son in the livingroom (though you’re really not supposed to). The IFCO has no role in the certification of straight-to-streaming releases or the endless guff on YouTube.

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In 2021, during the later stages of the Covid streaming boom, Hugh Linehan, writing in this paper, asked a telling question about the centenary: “What better way to recognise that doleful landmark than by finally getting the State out of the projection booth?”

Kissane says: “On-demand services are now subject to regulation for the protection of minors. And a lot of what we’re doing is about protection of minors. Since 2009, on-demand services have been subject to regulation. Since 2018 it has been extended to other services. It is not coming into this office because it is not a precertification requirement. That wouldn’t make sense for all that content. There is a complaint structure.”

Kissane sees a distinction between cinema and the other media.

“People go in. They buy a ticket. There is an immersive public experience,” he says. “One of the pieces that has been fed back in terms of the research – but also in terms of feedback from distributors and exhibitors – is that they value the cert. Somebody has allocated that certificate. They can work within that frame, and it’s the same frame for everyone. You are not getting something that is being rated differently by different providers.”

He doesn’t seem to feel the ground shaking under his feet.

“Nobody is really looking for a change in terms of the way the system operates currently,” he says. “And I think the advisory cert gives scope to distributors and also to exhibitors as to how that is implemented.”

There is a great sense of order and confidence about how Kissane goes about his work. He is keen on workshops that show the public how the IFCO functions. He talks about weighing changes in what is deemed inappropriate. (Representations of suicide, for example, are now viewed with much greater caution.) Mindful of that dedication to advice over prohibition, he has changed a key detail on the IFCO logo from red to green.

Nobody could imagine themselves back in the grim days of serial banning. And yet. Only a naive fellow believes in inevitable melioristic progress to ever-greater freedom. We could always go back. Couldn’t we?

“I think that’s conceivable for all aspects of society,” he says cautiously. “Anyone who assumes there is only one direction of travel… Well, that’s a philosophical question.”

There’s a chilling thought for the darkest month.