‘The Moral Ideas of the Community’: Censorship and Irish-Catholic Nation Building

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Though Ireland has never had an official state religion, Catholicism played a prominent role in shaping the nation during its struggle for independence and in the decades following. In the wake of new independence, those governing the country sought to bolster an Irish identity in opposition to that of the British.^[1] These efforts were heavily influenced by a conservative, institutional Catholicism so entrenched in the country’s politics and culture that the Church had a near-encompassing “monopoly on morality.”^[2] Catholicism in 20th-century Ireland embodied a culture of paternalism, a hierarchy in which those in power restrict the people’s freedom while maintaining that such restrictions benefit the people. Administrative agencies such as the Censorship of Publications Board reflected a government structured by the dominant co-influences of paternalistic Catholicism and efforts to establish national identity. Protecting a version of Irishness distinctly informed by early 20th-century Irish-Catholic morality, the Censorship of Publications Board reinforced a narrow construction of both morality and Irish national identity by keeping literature discussing desire, sexuality, and contraception from Irish readers. In doing so the Board’s project of censorship policed Irish citizens and particularly marginalized women and queer individuals.

In 1926, the Irish Minister for Justice formed a five-person Committee on Evil Literature to investigate “whether it is necessary in the interest of public morality to extend the existing powers of the State to prohibit or restrict the sale and circulation of printed matter.”^[3] To answer this question, the Committee gathered opinions from eight community organizations, seven of which were directly affiliated with the Catholic Church.^[4] After a year of deliberation, the Committee on Evil Literature produced a 20-page report recommending the formation of a Censorship of Publications Board and detailing the kind of material they proposed the Board censor. The first section of the report was devoted to an examination of the terms “indecency” and “obscenity,” which were identified as “offensive in sexual matters to the moral ideas of the community.”^[5]

Community morality is a highly variable concept, even within a specific place and time. To define terms in relation to “the moral ideas of the community,” was to make a generalization about who constituted the community. Here, the “community’s” ideas of public morality were defined by early 20th-century conservative Irish-Catholic values as gleaned from a committee of five men and a small number of Catholic organizations. Historian Senia Pašeta writes that “despite the guarantees of religious toleration which were enshrined in the 1922 constitution, the Irish Free State molded a form of citizenship in which active endorsement of, and obedience to, Catholic doctrine was implicit.”^[6] The Committee on Evil Literature exemplified how Catholic doctrine permeated the new government of the Irish Free State: in defining indecency and obscenity as enemies of public morality, the Committee effectively enshrined conservative Catholic definitions into secular governmental policy.

The Committee’s 1926 report consistently emphasized that problematic content came from the outside, a narrative that legitimized the necessity of a Censorship Board by positing censorship as an imperative battle to protect innocent Irish people.^[7] As historian Averill Earls has argued, government bodies such as the Censorship of Publications Board drew parameters around what constituted Irishness through the act of restricting access to literature discussing desire and contraception. As the Board othered these subject matters as non-Irish, it reasserted its moral authority and reinforced the Irish citizenry’s separation from such content.

Informed by the recommendations of the report by the Committee on Evil Literature, the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929 established a Censorship Board made up of five individuals who would be appointed by the Minister for Justice. The Act detailed three categories of publications to be prohibited: periodicals excessively detailing crime; “indecent or obscene” literature; and publications advocating “the unnatural prevention of conception.”^[8]

Through these restrictions the Irish government identified and cemented these categories as antithetical to public morality and Irish national identity. By preventing Irish people from exploring themes of desire and accessing information about contraception, the Board leaned into pre-existing Irish-Catholic antagonism towards sex, homosexuality, and contraceptives. And as it enforced this conservative Catholic morality, the Board was in turn reinforced by an Irish-Catholic nationalism that necessitated a paternalistic program of censorship as means to protect and preserve a certain vision of Catholic Irishness.

The connection between Irish-Catholic morality and censorship made challenging the Board difficult: when censorship meant the protection of good, moral Irish people, criticism of censorship was an indictment of not only a person’s morality but also their identity. This threat directly impacted how information was mediated and produced. As historian Mark O’Brien argues, during the height of censorship, Irish newspapers began to avoid the mere mention of contraceptives for fear of being accused of promoting deviance.^[9] In addition to its punitive authority to ban, fine, and imprison, the Board wielded the power to instill in the public and the press a fear of being maligned—a power rooted in its portrayal of censorship as a moral endeavor.

Censorship prevented Irish people from accessing materials that depicted, humanized, and communicated specific elements of human life relating to sexuality, desire, and bodies. The depictions of national identity available to Irish readers did not include a diversity of genders and sexualities nor discussions on how to express desire. They were also unlikely to offer information regarding one’s own body and reproductive system, which was particularly troubling for women and intersex individuals. Censorship policed human representations and bodies in the name of defending Catholic morals and national identity.

The use of Irish-Catholic nation building to define and warrant censorship marginalized Irish citizens whose gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation deviated from the state’s acceptable version of Irishness. Literary depictions of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming Irish individuals were considered indecent and obscene as the early 20th-century Irish-Catholic Church deemed these identities immoral and censorship confirmed them as non-Irish. Irish women were also marginalized by censorship, as decisions pertaining to their health and bodies were made for them by the men in power. As Irish politician and feminist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington noted in 1928, those who imposed censorship legislation deemed women “not only dangerous and explosive, but also a rather indecent quantity.” It is not so hard to see how in censoring “indecent” literature, the Board censored whatever was seen as “indecent” in Irish women.

Censorship continued to be a tool of repression in the decades after the Censorship of Publications was passed in 1929. The nation shifted towards what scholar Terry Eagleton refers to as “liberal paternalism,” which, while more permissive than earlier Irish-Catholic paternalistic structures, often offered the appearance of freedom without the reality.^[10] The Censorship of Publications Board molded itself to the new expectations of liberal paternalistic society through the Censorship of Publications Act, 1946. The new act granted citizens the ability to appeal censorship decisions, but appeals were decided by an Appeal Board whose members, like the Censorship of Publications Board, were appointed directly by the Minister for Justice. Thus, decisions about the appropriateness of literature were still ultimately decided by the men in power. As Irish writer and critic Seán Ó Faoláin wrote in a 1948 letter to the editor:

“I might remind the public that what writers have asked for was an Appeal Board, where their cases could be tried in a legal manner, and in public, since they were condemned publicly… Our whole point was that we were, and still are, outlawed—our work secretly condemned without legal redress. So it remains. We have no idea whether the present Appeal Board even meets.”^[11]

Ó Faoláin’s remarks evidence the Board’s persistent lack of accountability. Because the appeal process was opaque, and the Board still dictated suitable literature according to its own interpretation of Irish-Catholic morality, the 1946 Act had no real impact on the paternalistic structure.

It took many years, rapid secularization, and increasing social liberalism to loosen the grip of the Censorship of Publications Board. With the swift secularization of the past 25 years, the Censorship of Publications Board could no longer rely on an implicit religious moral mandate to defend the necessity of censorship.^[12] Neither could it rely on conservative, paternalistic routes to national identity-building. Though the nation still has a Catholic majority, Ireland’s Catholicism today is generally far more socially liberal and far less institutional and conservative.^[13] The Board’s power diminished and censorship greatly relaxed as the Board began to rely on an enshrined definition of morality and a conceptualization of Irishness that increasingly embraced the values and priorities of the people.

In fact, in 2023 Ireland’s Minister for Justice proposed a bill that would repeal the Censorship of Publications Acts. Announcing the bill, the Minister for Justice stated, “in the almost one hundred years of the censorship of publications legislation, there has been a dramatic shift in social policy and societal values in Ireland” and added that “repeal would mark another chapter in moving on from parts of Ireland’s past that no longer have a place in the present.”^[14] Her words articulated the dissonance between the morals and national identity the Board was set up to protect and that of the present nation. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that it took nearly 100 years for there to be legitimate moves within the Irish government to officially end their paternalistic and marginalizing censorship policies.

In one form or another, desire, sex, queerness, contraception, and abortion have repeatedly been targeted by censorship policies across the world and throughout history. Today, the pervasiveness of censorship is evident in the dramatic rise in school book bans in the United States and beyond, instances of big tech deliberately restricting information about reproductive health, and the Hungarian government’s requirement that LGBTQIA+ books be sealed in plastic wrap. Censoring materials relating to desire, sexuality, and bodily autonomy is a dangerous tool, often wielded by paternalistic, authoritarian-leaning states. It prevents people from exploring their full emotionality, physicality, and agency by limiting citizens to content deemed acceptable by those in power. In instances in which censorship restricts materials relating to desire, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, censorship becomes a tool for those in power to decide whose desire, sexuality, and bodily autonomy is right.

Notes

1. Timothy J. White, “The Impact of British Colonialism on Irish Catholicism and National Identity: Repression, Reemergence, and Divergence,” Études irlandaises 35, no. 1 (2010): 21-37. doi: https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.1743 ↑
2. Inglis, Tom. Moral Monopoly : The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987. ↑
3. Report of the Committee on Evil Literature, 1926, (Ireland), 3. ↑
4. Report of the Committee on Evil Literature, 4. ↑
5. Report of the Committee on Evil Literature, 8. ↑
6. Senia Pašeta, “Censorship and Its Critics in the Irish Free State 1922-1932,” Past & Present, no. 181 (2003): 193–218. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600789. ↑
7. Report of the Committee on Evil Literature. ↑
8. Censorship of Publications Act, 1929, (Ireland). ↑
9. Mark O’Brien, “Writing a Sexual Revolution: Contraception, Bodily Autonomy, and the Women’s Pages in Irish National Newspapers, 1935–1979,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 30, no. 1 (01, 2021): 92-111. doi:https://doi.org/10.7560/JHS30104. ↑
10. Terry Eagleton, “Priesthood and Paternalism,” New Blackfriars 47, no. 546 (1965): 141–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43244165. ↑
11. National Archives of Ireland, JUS/9/957, 1948-1949, Banned and Unbanned cuttings from “Irish Times” regarding the censorship of publications. ↑
12. 92.6% of the population of Ireland was Catholic at the time of the 1926 census. The percent grew slightly over the following decades and peaked in the 1961 census with 95% of the population listed as Catholic. In the 2002 census, the percentage was still fairly high with 88.4% listed as Catholic, but by 2022 the percent had fallen to 69%, a nearly 20-point decrease in 20 years. In that same period of time, the percent of the population identifying as not having a religion jumped from 3.5% to over 14%. ↑
13. Tom Inglis, “Church and Culture in Catholic Ireland,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 106, no. 421 (2017): 21–30. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90001071. ↑
14. “Minister McEntee Proposes New Bill to Repeal Almost Century Old Censorship of Publications Act,” gov.ie, November 21, 2023. https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/dfd8b-minister-mcentee-proposes-new-bill-to-repeal-almost-century-old-censorship-of-publications-act/. ↑

Featured image caption: Photo by Sefa Tekin.