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Censorship: ‘When we talk to students about this legislation, they look at us like we have two heads’

The language of the Act and the report that informed it – drawn up by the inimitably named Committee on Evil Literature – is stark to a modern reader

The Censorship of Publications Act 1929 is to be scrapped after a move by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Photograph: Gareth Chaney/Collins
The Censorship of Publications Act 1929 is to be scrapped after a move by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Photograph: Gareth Chaney/Collins
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Jack Horgan-Jones
Tue Nov 21 2023 - 19:16

“When we talk to students about this legislation, they look at us like we have two heads,” says Dr Mark O’Brien, head of the School of Communications at Dublin City University. The legislation in question – the Censorship of Publications Act 1929, and subsequent modifying laws – is to be scrapped by the Government after a move by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee.

The language of the Act and the report that informed it – drawn up by the inimitably named Committee on Evil Literature – is stark to a modern reader: The Act defined “indecent” as being construed as being “suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave”.

However alien it may seem, the legislation and what flowed from it – the banning of 12,000 publications – were very real for generations who saw the political and social life of the State shaped by the same forces that underpinned its drafting. For O’Brien, the legislation was an expression of a foundational part of the State’s vision for itself: “It reflected the early years of the State – to create a very distinct Irish identity based on Catholicism, on this idea of Irish exceptionalism” drawn up in reaction to what was “basically a moral panic that the new independent State was going to be engulfed by dirty books and dirty newspapers”.

Latterly, the notoriety of the censorship laws was derived from the canonical books that were banned: Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Brave New World, The Country Girls, Borstal Boy, to name a few (not Ulysses despite the enduring misconception).

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But the target was not necessarily literature – or at least, not just literature – but wherever certain information might be picked up by the population, not the intelligentsia, says Dr Aoife Bhreatnach, historian and host of the podcast Censored. “Our image is of elite literature like John Steinbeck or JD Salinger, the big seminal texts of literature, but they’re also looking at the stuff in the doctor’s office.” Of the first 13 books banned in May 1930, 10 were birth control books, she says. “That gives you an idea of what they were storing up to ban.”

The preoccupations – if not obsessions – of the powerful and influential in newly independent Ireland are reflected in the legislation and how it was enforced: that there had to be protection from foreign, corrupting influences seeking to shape the private, political and sexual lives of Irish people.

Newspapers and magazines had to carefully police themselves – before the blacklist was even enacted, an editor from Waterford was prosecuted for the way in which he published reporting of a sexual offences crime. Left-leaning British newspapers faced bans, with censorship not just of “the politics of the body, but also the bigger sense of politics in ideas and concepts coming from England”, she says.

In recent years, the board has fallen into near-total disuse, but it is not an artefact of the dim and distant past. In 1992, the Guardian was not distributed for sale as it contained an advertisement placed by the Marie Stopes clinic. Gardaí were present at Dublin Airport when the newspapers arrived. In the same year, Madonna’s book Sex was banned. In 2013 when he was minister for justice, a complaint was made about Alan Shatter’s steamy novel, Laura. It was not upheld.

One effect, Bhreatnach says, is that Irish people were forced to develop circular ways of talking about their own bodies. “Euphemism doesn’t get a chance to fade away,” she says, and a gulf of understanding emerged, particularly for women’s experience of sex and pregnancy. “They didn’t know what was happening to them or how to talk about it,” something she sees reflected in the testimonies of those who were sent to residential institutions.

For O’Brien, the legislation “fed into a generation of people that were undereducated” about sex, the power of the church, and he says it could be argued that it was part of an overall architecture that “allowed greater evils to exist for longer than they should have”.