Censored

Hundreds of magazine titles were banned by the Irish censor. This true-crime periodical, full of murder and gangsterism, couldn’t avoid being banned for discussing crime. But advertising ‘daring’ and ‘frank’ books didn’t help either.

• The exuberant rampant Americanness of this magazine is what really struck me.
• The law also banned court reports on ‘any indecent matter the publication of which would be calculated to injure public morals’.
• You can see the roots of contemporary true crime in this one edition.

The edition read for this episode is June 1930 https://archive.org/details/TrueDetectiveJune1930/mode/2up?view=theater

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When Maura Laverty gently pointed out that Irish villages simmered with perverted lust, her novel was immediately censored. Or maybe it was her pointed criticism of the state that offended the censors.

• If an author can please an Irish audience with a book called ‘darlin’ by the British, she must be doing something special.
• This is a chilling depiction of poverty and old age in the new County Homes, where the new republic has made no difference at all.
• This is all very soap opera - Laverty actually wrote a TV soap called Tolka Row in the 1960s.

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The pro-censorship lobby produced a rich and often hilarious polemic. Dr Lloyd (Maedhbh) Houston joins me to talk effluent, tainted minds and ‘race suicide’. We also debate whether censorship was more of a moral panic than a conspiracy theory.

• Alongside the priests, there are a lot of politicians in these debates where they use rhetoric of censorship to express profound and disturbed Anglophobia. Aoife Bhreatnach
• D.P. Moran would have thrived in today’s internet culture, he would have been the king of Twitter. Lloyd (Maedhbh) Houston
• If you are looking for filth in everything you read, you will find filth. Lloyd (Maedhbh) Houston
• Watching Irish politicians figure out who to blame for venereal disease after the British garrison has gone is so funny. Lloyd (Maedhbh) Houston

Browse censorship debates online https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/find/?debateType=dail

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The most memorable scandals in Irish life feature a fulminating bishop and this is no exception. This brief controversy is infamous but why do we find it so compelling? Dr Morgan Wait joins me to talk about television and titillation in 1960s Ireland.

• Anything that doesn’t feature Gay Byrne is going to get considerably less attention. Morgan Wait

• When people recognise themselves, or suspect they recognise themselves, they get cross and ask for changes. Aoife Bhreatnach

• One of the biggest letter writing incidents was around ‘Home Truths’ and it had nothing to do with censorship. Morgan Wait

• If the ‘Late Late Show’ was introducing sex to audiences, it was to people who were already having it. Aoife Bhreatnach

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Theatre riots might capture the imagination but audiences, critics and authority figures shape theatre in other less dramatic ways. Guest Dr Barry Houlihan talks about his new book Theatre and archival memory: Irish drama and marginalised histories 1951-77 (2022)

·     Reading a banned book is a private thing while theatre-going is a public political act.

·     Theatre is a way of dismantling the mechanics of the state and church.

·     Theatres are institutions in their own way – they can have set audiences that they cater for and don’t want to lose.

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When tax payers pay for libraries, librarians have a duty to ‘the public’. Defining that public isn’t easy, especially when priests, pressure groups and politicians get involved.

·     Being an arbiter of taste and decency was a tough job and nobody appreciated it.

·     The censorship mentality was still deeply embedded in a prudish and hypocritical society

·     He proceeded to tear up the books, pile them on the floor, take out a bottle of paraffin and a box of matches from his pocket.

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Moving pictures (de filums) were heavily censored but the state didn’t officially scrutinise other visual art forms. Censure by covert means was the preferred method to control subversive art. Guest: Dr Róisín Kennedy author of Art and the nation state: the reception of modern art in Ireland (2021)

·     Part of the emotional response comes from a sense that modern art is conning us, hoodwinking us. Dr Róisín Kennedy

·     Censorship culture made access to visual art elitist. Dr Róisín Kennedy

·     The production of art in Ireland was directly affected by censorship in that artists produced landscapes as opposed to nudes. Dr Róisín Kennedy

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Harry Clarke ‘Geneva Window’ https://artsandculture.google.com/story/harry-clarke%E2%80%99s-geneva-window-and-the-irish-free-state-the-wolfsonian-florida-international-university/QgXRl5iSZDgXIQ?hl=en

George Rouault ‘Christ and the Soldier’ (1930)

https://www.facebook.com/thehughlane/photos/a.142685499153995/4103076829781489/?type=3

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Everyone wanted a piece of Roger Casement but which piece? Carefully extracting his skeleton from heavy London mud in 1965 didn’t end the controversy over his life and lusts.

·     The treatment of Casement’s dead body was exceptionally cruel, even by the standards of executed prisoners.

·     Why are all our significant national events in March? Is there some penitential impulse forcing us to suffer for our patriotism?

·     After the burial of the great man in 1965, there little hope of anyone in Ireland reading his raunchy diaries, whether published or not.

·     The Roger Casement in the diaries is having great fun and that, more than anything, upsets people.

Some Reading:

Lucy McDiarmid ‘The Afterlife of Roger Casement’ in The Irish Art of Controversy (2005)

Jeffrey Dudgeon, Roger Casement: The Black Diaries (3rd edition, 2019)

‘Notes on the Exhumation of Roger Casement’s Remains’ in Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1961-65 vol 12

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The scandal over Roger Casement’s diaries is huge. People have spent millions of hours of obsessing over whether diaries allegedly found in his personal papers were forgeries or not. It’s past time I read the smut and examined the censure of the man and his writings.

• Truly, he was the hottest martyr of the 1916 Rising – you could argue he was the finest half who ever laid down his life for the cause of Irish freedom.
• If you are looking for filth, you have to read a lot about gambling, sailing on ships and lost luggage.
• Casement the hero cannot be Casement the man, especially if that man is a size queen with a very active sex life.

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Liam O’Flaherty was the angriest Irish author of his generation who raged against ‘soutaned witch-doctors’ (Catholic priests). He believed his outspokenness provoked social censure so severe that his work could not be found anywhere in Ireland. Guest: Teresa Dunne

• He’s a great man for the description of breasts Teresa Dunne
• I can’t believe we’re discussing whether holy medals count as a sex toy Aoife Bhreatnach

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