Come Here To Me!

In 1965, BBC journalist John Morgan was sent to Dublin to gather some idea of the attitudes of the Irish public to censorship. Standing outside a Dublin bookshop, he began his report by commenting on the types of books that did sell in Ireland. In the window behind him, we can see an ad for Dan Breen’s memoir My Fight For Irish Freedom, as well as other titles focused on the revolutionary period and Irish history more broadly.

On the streets, Morgan encountered a variety of opinions, but most of the public seemed broadly supportive of some degree of censorship of the printed word and screen. There were some voices of objection ,but in the words of one young man, “we’re not as liberal as the British, who are after all not a Christian race if one is to say that at present day.”

By the second half of the 1960s, censorship in Ireland was beginning to unravel, in no small part thanks to the efforts of some high profile victims of the Censorship of Publications Board to publicly challenge the body. This year, Dublin City Council and Dublin UNESCO City of Literature will celebrate Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy, a series of books which were banned upon release but are now recognised as Irish literary classics. As the very deserving chosen title for One City One Book, thousands of people across the city will engage with the work of an author whose work was shamefully dismissed as “a smear on Irish womanhood” at the time of publication.

Refusing to accept the banning of her works, O’Brien was central to the high profile foundation meeting of the Censorship Reform Society at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in December 1966, which received international attention. While living in London, she returned to Dublin, banned books in hand, to address the rally that included leading voices from the world of theatre, academia and literature. Of her arrival, the Irish Examiner noted:

Edna O’Brien, the Clare-born authoress, landed at Dublin Airport on Saturday night with five copies of her books. She left the airport holding only the dust jackets of her novels. The customs officials had confiscated the books.

Evening Herald, 5 December 1966.

Few public meetings receive the level of attention that the launch of the Censorship Reform Society on 4 December 1966 did,but the sheer calibre of speaker at their launch explains the public interest. Among thirteen speakers, theatre director and actor Micheal Mac Liammoir, poet Brendan Kennelly and novelist James Plunkett addressed the meeting. The following day, the Irish Press reported that “twelve men and Edna O’Brien declared that the system branded authors as pornographers, obscene and indecent.”

Jim Fitzgerald, theatre and television producer, served as Chairman of the group and was a driving force behind the rally. Taking a similar line to other opponents of censorship in Irish life, including Sean O’Faolain of The Bell, he emphasised that the society were not against all censorship, as “the society was not being formed to challenge the bona fide aims of the Censorship Board where it concerned genuine pornography, but to lay the grounds for a system of appeal against a law which forbade the works of many true artists appearing on the bookshelves or bookshops and libraries in this country.”

Around a hundred people were turned away from the packed Gate Theatre, where the meeting began with actors T.P McKenna and Maureen Toral reading excerpts from Edna O’Brien’s latest work, which was then in legal limbo, having been seized by customs and other consideration by the Censorship of Publications Board. The Censorship Reform Society announced its intention to challenge the banning of O’Brien’s work in the courts, if the Board deemed the book unfit for Irish audiences.

Not all reporting on the meeting was friendly, Seamus Brady in the Irish Press was particularly scathing of O’Brien, while also suggesting a link between ‘corrupting publications’ and crime in other nations:

The National Council of Juvenile Court Judges in the United States,which is surely more entitled to speak on the subject, has come out sternly to blame corrupting publications as a major cause of the growth of sex and armed robbery crimes among juvenile delinquents. then we have Miss Edna O’Brien,who is becoming somewhat tiresome in her self-appointed role of acting as special advocate in pleasing the cause of our womanfolk. Well, whatever they may say in the free and exacting atmosphere of Britain about our censorship, we are certainly broadminded when it comes to affording public platforms for our cranks and critics. Miss O’Brien enjoys the freedom of the State-owned Radio Telefis Eireann for her views.

Frustratingly, the Censorship of Publications Board was not obliged to give any information on why books were banned. Less than a week after the Gate Theatre meeting, it was announced that O’Brien’s Casualties of Peace was the latest banned work, with the press reporting that “the ban is on grounds of indecency. A spokesman for the Board would give no further details.” With this being the case, the Censorship Reform Society called for “a system whereby a banned author could appeal to the courts”.

1st UK edition of Causalities of Peace, banned by the Censorship of Publications Board (Image Credit: Ulysses Rare Books)

Living outside of Ireland, O’Brien perhaps felt more comfortable challenging censorship than other Irish writers, who were sometimes victimised in their professional lives when works fell foul of the Board. Most famously, the fallout from the banning of John McGahern’s The Dark has contributed, at least in part, to his removal from a teaching post. To be banned, it was joked, an honour for an Irish writer. Still, as O’Faolain noted, it could also bring feelings of great anger. On learning that his book Midsummer Night Madness was banned, he later noted that “outwardly I laughed at the news. In my heart I felt infuriated and humiliated.”

How important was the Censorship Reform Society in changing things? In truth, censorship was already in the process of collapse. Bruce Arnold recalled that the body was short lived:

Some of us started the Censorship Reform Society. Edna O’Brien spoke at the Gate Theatre on the inaugural night. We had seen Edna’s novels banned, along with a host of other works of literature, and we wanted to fight this.

As with most Irish ventures, few offered financial help. In any case, the society was overtaken by events; censorship began to crumble.

The Censorship Reform Society did succeed in bringing public scrutiny on the Censorship Publications Board. Judge Charles Conroy, chairman of the board,  found himself in the spotlight after the rally, telling one journalist from Trinity News that “our main aim is to keep filth out of this country.” The student journalist came away from it all wondering:

Is the judge himself qualified to be on the Censorship Board? In my hour’s conversation with him he did not appear to have anything more than superficial knowledge of literature. The main attribute of all the members of the Board was their common sense, rather than their knowledge of literature.

1967 brought real reform to Irish censorship law, as now prohibition orders made on the grounds of indecency would expire after a period of twelve years, though they could then be reexamined then. The immediate effect of the reform was the unbanning of thousands of works. Undoubtedly, the controversies around 1960s works like O’Brien’s and McGahern’s had played a pivotal role in this change. If nothing else, the December 1966 meeting was an unprecedented united front against censorship from right across the artistic community.

O’Brien very beautifully described Irish censorship as being rooted in a “fear of knowledge, a fear of communicating our desires, our secrets, our stream of consciousness”.  This year, Dublin will rightly honour her work, and her contribution to intellectual freedom in Irish life.