The names Donal O’Rourke, Anne Foley, Helena Carty and Barney Steele may not ring any immediate bells of recognition but these four individuals are the people who decide what kind of books, magazines and newspapers you and I are allowed to read. Last year, for instance, this quartet of civil guardians ordained that it would not be in our own best interests if we were to peruse four specific novels (to wit Dream 16 Lovers, Nymphomania, Black Buck and Suck Off), one magazine (Escort) and one newspaper (The Daily Sport). In 1992, it was they who decreed that we just wouldn’t be able for Madonna’s Sex, Dr Felix G. Berger’s The G-Spot in Words and Pictures and a whole raft of continental classics with titles such as Mann Oder Frau, Pralle Dickerchen and Spagat fur Kenner.

Since January 1st, 1986 alone, this anonymous foursome and their predecessors have banned a total of seventy-two books and thirteen periodicals. This year, they will meet on an average of once every two months to add to the list of publications that are suitable For Their Eyes Only.

O’Rourke, Foley, Carty and Steele are the current members of the Irish Censorship of Publications Board. There should actually be five of them but, shortly after this particular Board was appointed in November 1991, the fifth member chose to retire and their boss, the Minister for Justice, has still not yet replaced him. Hot Press contacted the Department of Justice in order to ascertain precisely what singular attributes these people possess that makes them so uniquely qualified to make such decisions on our behalf.

“Apart from the position of chairperson which must be filled by a solicitor or judge of ten years standing, there are no specific qualifications for appointment to the Censorship Board,” insisted a spokeswoman for the Minister. “Obviously though, they must all be people of sensible character with a broad-minded view of the world and a genuine interest in reading.”

Yes, obviously.

GRIM REAPERS

The first Censorship of Publications Act was passed in 1929, and the Censorship Board was founded the following year. At the time, both measures were motivated, at least partly, in response to a report by a Committee on Evil Literature, published in 1927, which had declared that Ireland was “awash in imported pornography and filth.”

It is no mere coincidence, however, that the Knights of Columbanus had been formed only five years earlier, and that they had been kicking up a deafening din, both inside and outside the fledgling Dail, about the need for “more Government legislation to bolster and sustain Catholic teaching.”

Then as now, a new Censorship Board was to be appointed every five years but the composition of the Board for the first two decades or so almost always followed the same model : three Catholic laymen, one Catholic priest ( invariably, the chairman) and, so as to bestow a pluralist air on their smut-hunt, one Protestant clergyman.

From the get-go, pockets of the populace took to the great national porn-purge like fleas to a dog-pound. As the late Brendan O’hEithir recounted in his excellent Begrudger’s Guide To Irish Politics : “Vigilance committees scoured libraries and the country’s handful of bookshops, underlining passages that seemed to contravene the sacred Act. Customs officials ransacked parcels and purloined likely volumes. Rumour had it that they tried out the dirty bits on their wives in bed before forwarding books to the Board.”

Very quickly, the banning of books became to the Irish people what snow is to the Eskimos, and the Censorship of Publications Board drove a fierce and relentless snow-plough. Virtually every Irish writer of note got at least one entry on the Board’s blacklist. Chief among the homegrown damned and banned were James Joyce ( for Stephen Hero but not for Ulysses which was published before the Act but which wasn’t available in shops or libraries anyway), Sean O’ Casey, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Frank O’ Connor, Sean O’ Faolain, Liam O’Flaherty, John McGahern, Austin Clarke and Brendan Behan.

Considerations of space and the personal risk of repetitive strain injury prevent me from listing even a fraction of the best known authors from abroad, living and dead, who were tarred with the banning brush. When I tell you, however, that even Barbara Cartland novels were being prohibited, you begin to have some inkling of the scope of their puritanical trawl.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Board continued to scythe down title after title like the grim reapers they were. In the peak year of the ‘50s, over a thousand books were banned. Between 1950 and 1955, it has been estimated that prohibitions were being issued on an average of two books per day.

Even during the 1960s, an era in which it is often assumed that some degree of sanity began to prevail, almost all of what are now regarded as the important works were slapped on the proscribed list. In 1963 alone, for example, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and a paperback edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex were all banned.

FURTHER REPEAL

It was Brian Lenihan, with his trained eye for a convenient Irish solution to an Irish problem, who in 1967 made the first tentative attempt to loosen the palsied grip of the Censorship Board and everything it represented. As the then Minister for Justice, Lenihan introduced a Bill which provided for the removal of the ban on a book after twenty years had elapsed, unless the ban was reimposed. Before this, when a book was banned the intention was that it would stay banned, indefinitely.

On the day this Bill was being debated in the Dail, however, Linehan was surprised to find just how little resistance he was getting from the unexpectedly sparsely populated opposition benches so, there and then, he reduced the term of expiration of a prohibition order to twelve years. When it was passed, this Bill released thousands of books into the Irish public domain and marked the beginning of the end of the censorship of serious literature while still, of course, retaining the basic legislation intact.

At the time, this piece of Jesuitical conjuring was undoubtedly seen as a great triumph of chicanery over political necessity. Unfortunately, the sense of self-satisfaction proved so overwhelming that it has allowed even liberal elements in successive governments to believe that the censorship question had been “dealt with.” No further repeal of the original 1929 and 1946 Acts has take place since Brian Lenihan pulled his relatively fast one on July 11th, 1967.

The upshot is that Ireland still harbours hefty censorship laws on its statute books and the Censorship Board still retains the power to punch out the lights of any publication which it considers unworthy of our nation’s delicate sensibilities.

DISGUSTED PARENT

A book can come under the consideration of the Censorship Board in any one of three ways. It can be detained by a customs and excise officer and referred for examination. It can be the subject of a complaint from a member of the public. And the personnel on the Board itself can, at any time, choose to inspect any book on their own initiative.

In contrast, the Board has no authority to examine a periodical unless it is on foot of a direct complaint. One such complaint, however, is sufficient to empower them to act. If it is then decided that the periodical in question is to be prohibited, it is first banned for three, six or twelve months depending on how often it is published. Then, if it is referred to the Board a second time, it becomes permanently prohibited unless its publishers appeal, something which, in reality, few publishers bother to do.

The current list of permanently banned periodicals includes Playboy, Penthouse, Escort, Fiesta, Rustler, Esprit, Casino, Video-The Magazine, Parade Extra, Color Climax, New Direction, The Daily Sport and The Sunday Sport.

Clearly, when all that is required to initiate the prohibition process is that one person be offended by a newspaper or magazine, the Censorship Act offers an open charter for the pious ,the prudish and the mentally-defective ( not always three distinct groups,of course). Between 1981 and 1990, the last period for which full figures are available, the Board examined a total of 349 books. Of these, 238 were referred by customs and 106 were formal complaints by private individuals.

The Board’s secretary, Peggy Garvey, insists that there are no statistics collated on what proportion of these complaints were submitted by regulars, people who make a habit out of being offended. Nevertheless, I’ll bet my personal contraband copy of The Complete Guide to Sexual Positions and Advanced Sexual Techniques ( banned since July 1990) that the bulk of them came from the same half-dozen or so citizens who “jam” the RTE switchboard whenever a glimpse of bare ankle is broadcast on television. The kind of people who write letters to the national newspapers in red ink, signing themselves DISGUSTED PARENT.

Anyway, when a book or periodical is referred to the Censorship Board, its members are compelled to scan it with the business end of their personal filth-detectors. According to the legislation, they can issue a prohibition order on any publication which they feel is “in its general tendency indecent or obscene.” Indecent is defined in the 1946 Act as “suggestive of, or inciting to, sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave.” The meaning of the word obscene is evidently left up to one’s own imagination.

With a periodical, the Board must also consider whether recent issues have “devoted an unduly large proportion of space to the publication of matter relating to crime.” If it is deemed that they have, sale and distribution of that periodical can be immediately halted. How therefore, one is forced to wonder, has the Evening Herald survived for so long ?

SEX EDUCATION

Most disturbing of all, however, is the third directive, which states that a publication can also be banned if it “advocates the unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage or the use of any method, treatment or appliance for the purpose of such prevention or procurement.”

In practice, the Board insists, this stipulation is nowadays rather loosely interpreted and is only acted upon in reference to publications which specifically advocate abortion. In July 1990, for instance, The Complete Guide to Sex was prohibited solely on that basis. Preposterous enough as this clearly is, the wider implications of the actual wording of this part of the legislation are frighteningly Orwellian.

Okay, so nobody is going to venture out to bat for the literary merits of volumes such as The Lustful Turk, Nymph In Paris or Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin, but banning this kind of harmless wankenalia in these days of the Super Information Highway is patently absurd.

Furthermore, alongside the erotica, sex education publications of all kinds ( from The Illustrated Kama Sutra through The Woman Book of Love and Sex to How to be the Perfect Lover) regularly fall foul of the Censorship Board. Given the obvious demand in this country for increased knowledge about all matters relating to sex, this situation is downright indefensible.

The tenure of the current Censorship of Publications Board expires in November ’96. If this Government is serious about dragging Ireland into the twentieth century, it should not be reappointed.