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

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СКАЧАТЬ from the example of eleven countries and states where statutes relating to obscene publications were in force. The problem such publications created had indeed been the subject of an international convention for the suppression of the circulation of and traffic in obscene publications, organized by the League of Nations in 1923. A responsible government in the 1920s in almost any country would have felt that there was nothing unusual about the enactment of a bill to censor certain publications and to protect populations from pornography.

      It was clear, too, from the report of the Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature and from the Dáil and Senate debates on the issue that efforts were made by the legislators to distinguish the merely pornographic from works which might possess literary merit. Indeed, a good deal of the firepower of the bill was aimed not at literary works but at the many imported popular newspapers and magazines that were considered unsavory and at works which recommended, or provided information on, birth control.

      There were signs, nevertheless, that an Irish Censorship Bill might represent something more stringent than a government’s rational attempt to suppress the more vicious forms of pornographic publication. These perhaps account for the alarm that the mere proposal of the bill aroused (as we shall see) in the minds of most Irish writers of the time. Much of the public demand for the bill was orchestrated not by members of the political parties but by Irish Vigilance Societies (the Irish Vigilance Association had been founded in 1911 by the Dominican Order) and by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (founded in 1899, among whose aims was the effort “to combat the pernicious influence of infidel and immoral publications by the circulation of good, cheap and popular Catholic literature”).³⁰ It might reasonably have been feared that such bodies, in a country where the mass of the population was encouraged by the church to observe a peculiarly repressive sexual code, would press for a censorship policy expressing not literary and aesthetic but strict Catholic moral values.

      Furthermore, a prevailing note sounded in the writings and speeches of those calling for a censorship bill was the notion that all evil in literary and journalistic matters derived from abroad, particularly from England. It was, therefore, the business of an Irish legislature to protect Irish life from the impure external influences and to help build up a healthy, clean-minded Catholic Irish civilization. It must protect that supposedly distinctive Irish religious life and practice that, sometimes associated with the Irish language and the Gaelic way of life, comprised national identity. It was at this point that the interests of those who sought censorship from moralistic impulses alone and the interests of those, like the Irish Irelanders, who desired cultural protectionism, met and often overlapped. An example of such an overlap is provided in the demand by a certain Father R. S. Devane, SJ, for a tariff on imported literature and journalism. Father Devane was a Dublin priest who had been strenuous in his efforts to arouse public support for the cause of censorship of indecent and obscene publications. He had met with Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State’s Minister for Justice, in 1925 to put, on behalf of an organization to which he belonged, the Priests’ Social Guild, the case for a censorship bill, and he was the only private individual who presented evidence before the Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature established by O’Higgins in 1926. In 1927, in the Jesuit periodical Studies, Father Devane went a step further, arguing for high tariffs on imported publications in the following terms:

      We are at present engaged in an heroic effort to revive our national language, national customs, national values, national culture. These objects cannot be achieved without a cheap, healthy and independent native press. In the face of English competition such a press is an impossibility…Against such propaganda of the English language and English ideas the present effort at national revival looks very much like the effort to beat back an avalanche with a sweeping brush.³¹

      Here cultural protectionism of the Irish Ireland kind is proposed, but the cultural impulses coexist with a particular vision of morality embodied in the one word “healthy.” The Reverend M. H. MacInerny, OP, editor of the Dominican magazine The Irish Rosary and an active member of the Vigilance Association since 1912, in a comment on Father Devane’s suggestion clearly grasped the twin impulses, moral and cultural, that fired Father Devane’s demand for tariffs as well as censorship. Agreeing with “every word” in Father Devane’s article, he continued:

      By all means let legislative effect be given, without undue delay, to the unanimous recommendation of the Commission on Evil Literature; this will at once bar out a great mass of prurient and demoralizing publications. For economic, national and cultural reasons of the highest moment, the Oireachtas ought to pass a resolution imposing a heavy tariff on the remainder of what Father Devane calls the “popular” class of imported publications.³²

      That such individuals represented public opinion on the matter, inasmuch as the public interested itself in literary and cultural affairs at all, there can be little doubt. The only outspoken opposition to such thinking came from writers themselves and had little effect. Indeed, there were those in the country who, far from attending to the writers’ criticisms of the proposed bill, merely thought they deserved to be silenced and that they were understandably fearful of the just deserts that awaited them. Such, certainly, was the attitude of the Catholic Bulletin, which had long waged a battle against Irish writers on the grounds of their alien immorality and pagan un-Irish philosophy. Indeed that periodical, in an even more obvious fashion than Father Devane’s article, suggests that a good deal of Irish Ireland enthusiasm in the period was generated less by idealistic cultural imperatives than by a desire to advance Catholic power and social policy in the country through the defeat of Protestant Ireland and the anglicized culture associated with it, in ideological warfare. For the periodical, edited until 1922 by Seán Ua Ceallaigh, who was president of the Gaelic League between 1919 and 1923 and thereafter by Patrick Keohane with Professor Timothy Corcoran as a guiding spirit, combines much anti-Protestant invective and hatred of Freemasonry with a celebration of an Irish Ireland life that comprises staunch Catholic as well as Gaelic elements. With an almost entertaining virulence of phrase, the Bulletin had excoriated the work of Yeats, Russell, Joyce, and Gogarty as the machinations of a new Ascendancy exploiting Ireland for squalid foreign gold. The periodical greeted W. B. Yeats’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 with that xenophobia which characterized its attitudes to most Irish writing in English and which fueled the fires of its demand for censorship.

      The Nobel Prize in Literature is the occasion. Senator Gogarty directs attention to the fact that on this issue there was recently a tussle between the English colony in Ireland and the English of England, for the substantial sum provided by a deceased anti-Christian manufacturer of dynamite. It is common knowledge that the line of recipients of the Nobel Prize shows that a reputation for paganism in thought and word is a very considerable advantage in the sordid annual race for money, engineered as it always is, by clubs, coteries, salons, and cliques. Paganism in prose or in poetry has, it seems, its solid cash value: and if a poet does not write tawdry verse to make his purse heavier, he can be brought by his admirers to where the money is, whether in the form of an English pension, or in extracts from the Irish taxpayer’s pocket, or in the Stockholm dole.³³

      The Bulletin was, of course, an organ of extremist propaganda but its attitudes were not unknown in other areas of Irish society, if their expression was customarily rather less inflamed. People like those who had denounced Synge’s treatment of Ireland in The Playboy of the Western World could still be found ready to object to any unflattering literary portrait of their country.

      D. P. Moran in the Leader added his eloquent Irish Ireland voice to the demand for a firm censorship policy, and critics at a rather more theoretical level were at work on studies that might provide ideological ammunition for cultural protectionism. The writings of Daniel Corkery, in The Hidden Ireland, and later in his study of Synge, where he made residence in Ireland a union card in a closed shop of Irish letters, did nothing to encourage СКАЧАТЬ