Analysis: The story behind the draconian Censorship of Publications Board which kept a close eye on Irish publications from 1930 to 2016
Censorship in Ireland silenced many and varied voices. From biographies, pulp fiction and novels to contraception information and pornography, the State's draconian and arcane Censorship of Publications Board banned more than 12,000 publications between 1930 and 2016.
Among the novels banned through those years were Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (and her five subsequent novels), Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, John Broderick's The Pilgrimage and Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle, as well many books by international writers.
But it all began with the 1926 Committee on Evil Literature. While Ireland may have inherited obscenity laws from the British, the Committee on Evil Literature was the culmination of a long campaign to bring in a new form of censorship, says Dr Aoife Bhreatnach, historian and host of Censored, a podcast where she delves into some of the thousands of banned books on Ireland’s blacklist. The Catholic Truth Society drove the creation of the Committee, with support from the hierarchy "who have long been fulminating against evil literature."
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Dr Aoife Bhreatnach on libraries and censorship
In early 20th century Ireland, there was lots of concern about "dirty books", dissemination of information about contraception and newspapers. "Newspapers were so widely read, so cheap and carrying all that salacious news about divorce courts, which was an excuse to talk about extramarital sex," she explains.
Minister for Justice, Kevin O’Higgins appointed three laymen (one Professor of English and two TDs) and two clergymen (one Church of Ireland and one Roman Catholic) to the Committee. He tasked them with considering "whether it is necessary or advisable in the interest of public morality to extend the existing powers of the State to prohibit or restrict the sale and circulation of printed matter."
Through the press, the Committee extended an invitation to the general public to submit evidence and recommendations - which many did - and sent "special invitations" to certain organisations, like the Boys' Brigade, the Catholic Writers' Guild, the Irish Vigilance Association and the Irish National Teachers Organisation. Of the 14 organisations invited, only one opined that existing laws were adequate.
The Committee decided it was indeed necessary, as well as advisable, that the State be given extended powers to police moral evils, and its report informed the formation of the Censorship of Publications Board and the Censorships of Publication Act 1929. With that, the Irish State set into motion an intense and secretive period of wide-reaching censorship.
The legislation prohibited the sale and distribution of "unwholesome literature", a broad and arguably subjective term. Any publication or image deemed indecent or obscene by the Board could be banned, including the reporting in newspapers of details from court cases about divorce, the "unnatural prevention of conception", abortion or miscarriage, as well as medical details that could "injure public morals". The word "indecent" is defined in the legislation as covering anything "suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave."
Transparency about the workings of the Board was not the order of the day. Bhreatnach points out that it’s thanks to Lynn Doyle, the humorist and playwright, that we know something of how books were censored. Doyle resigned in 1937 after five weeks on the board, and decried the process in his resignation letter, published in newspapers, describing how an official first marks passages that he thinks comes under the Act, before the marked books are then sent to members of the Board in turn. "It’s nearly impossible to report on general tendency after reading the marked passages. Even when one reads the book through afterwards one is under the influence of the markings," he wrote.
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From RTÉ News in November 2023, Ireland's censorship laws being repealed following cabinet decision
"There are very few records from this office of its daily workings," says Bhreatnach. It was a deliberately obscure branch of government. "It's a tradition that censorship tries to erase itself, and tries to make itself invisible, and that's very much how the Irish office operated."
The idea that books and reading were potentially dangerous and had to be closely surveilled "was everywhere", she says. "I think that that must have had an important effect on everybody living in the society, whether you went on to write or not," she says. "Writers like Doris Lessing who grew up in South Africa, which also had a very strong censorship, writes that the censor gets between the writer and the page sometimes, even when you try not to."
Novelist John McGahern had his second novel The Dark banned in 1965, which led to his dismissal from his job as a teacher in a Dublin school. He moved to London where he continued to teach. Speaking about the experience in 1979, McGahern said "some of it seems funny in hindsight, but not at the time. It was quite disturbing, and scandalous."
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From RTÉ Archives, John McGahern talks about being banned on a 1979 episode of 'States of Mind' with presenter Mary Holland
"Certainly some people I think felt they had to leave, and that it was just a way of trying to escape that feeling of censoriousness," says Bhreatnach. "It absolutely made a difference to how writers lived and worked." More widely, it affected the kind of material that was available to ordinary people, living in country towns. "What sort of books could they get, in the context of a library that was already under-resourced, and that is then being filleted regularly for 'dodgy content’?"
The censorship board "covered everything, and I think that's the point. When you look at that vast list that's what strikes me the most," she says. Frank O’Connor’s English translation of the Irish poem The Midnight Court was banned in 1946 because it was a "bad translation," according to one censor, who himself admitted he did not speak Irish. "Whatever about the crazy logic about the evil, English, nefarious publications polluting our perfectness, this was our idyllic, Irish-speaking culture that was being censored, and that's just appalling,"says Bhreatnach.
The 1950s saw a spike in the number of publications being banned thanks to "cheap, mass-produced pulp fiction novels" coming in from American and Britain. "They really become the target of the Board for a short period of time, particularly because at that point it's headed by a Catholic priest who's very good friend of John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin."
Changes, however, were made over the years. The 1946 Act introduced an appeals process (until then, an author couldn’t challenge the banning of their work). With the 1967 Act, the bans are shortened to 12 years (but books could, of course, still be banned again) and a slew of books are "released from censorship jail," but there’s no official statement of policy on literature and novels, explains Bhreatnach. "In keeping with the tradition of not telling us what they're doing, we don't know why, but it's an observable trend."
There were "peaks and troughs" in censorship, but it wasn’t until the mid 1970s that the Board essentially stops banning literature and novels, while continuing to ban erotica, porn, and birth control material into the 1990s. "That point seems to have marked an unofficial reform internally, in that the rates of banning serious literature tail off from then," she says.
Novels were not the only thing banned. In the 1970s, groups like the Irish Family Planning Association were at the forefront of fighting censorship laws, and they brought a court challenge against the ban of one of their publications in 1976. In court, the Censorship Board had to stand up and defend its reasons for banning the association's publication. The courts were not satisfied with their explanation, and this marked the "beginning of chipping away at the idea of banning things because the information is bad for you."
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From RTÉ Archives, The Censorship of Publications Board removes a ban on 'Playboy' magazine in 1995, but are the Irish public ready for it?
"Within the censorship of publications act, it's heavily bound up with suppressing birth control and the banning of birth control technology and information. The devices are banned in a separate piece of legislation, the condoms themselves are banned. But if you also ban information about condoms, you create complete silence about these practices. Even the idea that birth could be controlled," says Bhreatnach.
"We talk about the Censorship Board all the time in relation to novels, which is hugely important, but we're less aware of the birth control aspects of their work, which also had huge ramifications for how people lived their daily lives, [it] reached into their their bedrooms and their sitting rooms and their kitchens in every way. Censorship was present in ordinary people's lives all the time and nobody talked about it that much, it was not something the newspapers were interested in discussing very often."
The Register still currently contains nine banned books, with the earliest dating back to 1942 and the most recent from 2016.
Yes, it was supported by the Catholic Church, but even they thought it wasn’t harsh enough, she adds. "It’s a state thing, it's run by lay people. There are clerics involved, but it's the State who police the whole thing. It's the guards who call into book shops and prosecute people. It’s a lot more complicated than just, ‘the Church did this to us’, we did it to ourselves, with the church's help. And it was hard to dismantle for that reason. That's why it lasted so long."
The Register still currently contains nine banned books with the earliest dating back to 1942 and the most recent from 2016, and there are currently 264 prohibited periodicals dating from the earliest in 1930 to the most recent in 2003. The government has approved a new bill to repeal the Censorship of Publications Acts and the Board is to be stood down.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
