Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

bill, when it eventually appeared, was apparently a much less draconian legislative tool than had been feared. The Minister for Justice was willing to make amendments to the bill when it was presented to the Dáil, and the bill itself failed to implement the Committee on Evil Literature’s recommendation that there should be recognized associations in the country charged with bringing dubious publications to the attention of the Censorship Board. What Oliver St. John Gogarty, the poet, wit, surgeon, and senator, had feared as “the most monstrous proposal that has ever been made in this country,”³⁶ since it implied that the Irish should make use of their “recently won liberty to fill every village and hamlet with little literary pimps who will be recognized,” was not to be part of the legislative process. No one at the time of the bill’s enactment foresaw that the customs would fulfil the function of public watchdog, referring books upon suspicion to the board in large numbers, thereby filling the role that the Committee on Evil Literature envisaged for the recognized associations. Even the Irish Statesman, which had waged a protracted campaign against the bill, was able to express relief that it had turned out rather better than expected. J. J. Horgan in an essay on affairs in the Irish Free State in the Round Table probably expressed the general satisfaction of those who had been disturbed by the possibilities of an Irish censorship when he wrote in March 1929, “The debates on this measure in the Dáil have been more courageous than was to be expected.” In May 1930 he reported on the earliest effects of the new legislation, recounting with relish how in some respects the act was proving counterproductive, where it was having any effect at all:

      The first result of the new Censorship of Publications Act has been the banning of seventeen books by the Minister for Justice on the advice of the Censorship Board. The only three of any importance are Mr Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Miss Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (which has already been banned in England), and Mr Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals. The remainder of the books censored are principally the works of Dr Marie Stopes and writers of her ilk on the subject of birth control. It is interesting to record that one bookseller who had six copies of Mr Huxley’s book which he could not sell, sold them all on the day the censorship of that volume was announced, and also received orders for twelve additional copies.³⁷

      The Minister for Justice, Horgan informs us, was rather concerned that lists of banned books were being published in the daily press, thus conferring upon them a certain notoriety. He also regretted, it appears, that few people were bringing objectionable works to the Censorship Board’s attention. On this latter point Horgan observed with what seemed like sage equanimity:

      The fact is that very few people in Ireland read any modern books at all, and that those who do are not likely to take the trouble of acting as literary informers to the Censorship Board. In any event, to attempt a censorship of modern literature, even in one language, is not unlike trying to drink a river.³⁸

      That for almost forty years the Censorship Board would make this epic attempt seemed in 1930 an improbability. That it was in a large part successful is a cultural fact of twentieth-century Ireland that as yet has not been comprehensively analyzed.

      Twenty years after the enactment of the bill the writer and critic Arland Ussher, who had been involved in the fight against censorship in the 1920s, managed a retrospective detachment, providing a measured assessment:

      We were wrong and over-impatient – unjust also, to the men who were re-building amid the ruins…We…concentrated our indignation on their Acts for prohibiting divorce and for prohibiting the sale of “evil literature” – measures which might have been expected from any Irish Catholic government, and which, considering the social atmosphere of Ireland, did little more than register prohibitions that would in any case have been effective, in fact if not in form.³⁹

      Other individuals who perhaps suffered more directly from the fact and the form of the prohibitions could not afford such an olympian historicism. In the 1920s Dermot Foley was a librarian who had left his native Dublin to take up a post as a librarian in Ennis, County Clare. In an essay published in 1974 he told how the wave of national enthusiasm that had inspired the War of Independence, “a spirit of optimism and participation so powerful that it survived the terrible realities of a civil war,” broke, in his case in County Clare, against the harsh rocks of puritanical philistinism. He remembered the effects of the Carnegie Trust row:

      An incident that was treated as farce by sensible people nearly foundered the whole library movement. Its consequences hit me in Clare. In Irish Revival terms, thereafter books were tainted and it was left to the Censorship Board to expose libraries as seed-beds of corruption. It became a statutory, inexhaustible beanfeast for the bigots and obscurantists, and in due time made a dog’s dinner of defenceless people who, above all things, badly needed a bit of leadership to lift them out of the morass of ignorance they had for so long endured.⁴⁰

      For Foley the greatest crime perpetrated by censorship was not the undoubted injury done to Irish writers, not the difficulty experienced by educated men and women in getting hold of banned works, but the perpetuation of cultural poverty in the country as a whole, left without the leaven of serious contemporary literature.

      My library was whipped into serving up an Irish stew of imported westerns, sloppy romances, blood-and-murders bearing the nihil obstat of fifty-two vigilantes, and anything escaping them was lying in unread bundles on the shelves of musty halls and schools.⁴¹

      So the Censorship of Publications Act gave a licence to Irish Grundyism which had its censorious way in literary matters for almost four decades of Irish independence.

       CHAPTER 3

       Images and Realities

      A commonplace of Irish Ireland cultural analysis in the 1920s was that Ireland without the Irish language was spiritually deficient, even impoverished, the central impulse of a genuine separatism terribly thwarted. Indeed national existence was in serious jeopardy. Undoubtedly many of those who thought in this fashion were quite genuinely moved by a pained vision of the cultural deprivation complete anglicization could entail, appalled by the idea that the langauge could die in an independent Ireland, and truly fearful for the future. Some few others, however, were perhaps more concerned with the advance of Catholic power in the new state and were prepared to use the revival of Irish and a celebration of a narrow conception of the Gaelic way of life as a weapon to discomfort Protestant, anglicized Anglo-Ireland. Both groups, whether consciously or unconsciously, undervalued what was in fact the inheritance that the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had bequeathed to the citizens of the new state. For newly independent Ireland was endowed with a repository of myths, images, and motifs, literary modes and conventions cultivated to a degree that might indeed have been the envy of most emerging states in a century of infant, fragile nationalisms. The antiquarian literary and cultural activity of the preceding one hundred years had offered Irishmen and women a range of modes of thought and feeling that could help confirm national identity and unity. So, when these imaginative assets are reckoned together with the social and national binding powers of an overwhelmingly homogeneous religious belief and practice, which provided a primary sense of identity, it can readily be seen that the new state was rich in integrative resources in spite of the vision of national fragility that Irish Ireland employed as an ideological weapon.

      Throughout much of the nineteenth century Irish nationalism had accreted an iconography and a symbolism. Motifs such as shamrocks, harps, round towers, celtic crosses, and sunbursts had become associated with patriotic feeling, and national sentiment had expressed itself in song, ballad, and rhetoric. The new state could draw on this repository of national motifs and feeling as it wished – the harp, for example, became the state’s official symbol. Furthermore, at the end of