Hurtling along today's information superhighway, it's hard to believe publications are still banned and censored. "Censorship", for most of us suggests an era of granny and grandad heading off for tea and biscuits at the local dance - attended by the parish priest, naturally.
In an era of "57 channels", with unadulterated access to information on the Internet and soft porn available up on the top shelf of news agents all over the State, you'd be forgiven for assuming ours was a nation of freedom of expression.
Yet only last month a magazine with a circulation of 10,000, and a primary function as a guide to events taking place in the capital city, was whipped off the shelves. When In Dublin was banned for six months this summer it opened the floodgates to discussion on Irish censorship and morality. Under the Censorship of Publications Act, books and "periodical publications" (i.e., newspapers, journals and magazines) can be banned if deemed to be indecent or obscene, or if they advocate the use of contraception or the procurement of abortion.
The Censorship of Publications Board explained that In Dublin was banned because editions of the magazine "have usually or frequently been indecent or obscene". The board was not more specific, but it seems the advertisements for "health studios" were the source of the problem. Your typical ad runs something like this: "Our friendly female instructors will visit you." While this might be suggestive, and may indeed relate to an illegal activity, it's hard to understand how this could be classified as obscene.
Meanwhile, on the top shelf, the current issue of Playboy magazine carries "Playboy's 36 Uncensored Portraits" and, on the lower shelves, Loaded offers its `The Sex Issue'. So now. How does censorship work, you might wonder? Who decides what indecent means? And on what basis? The Censorship of Publications Board is a five-person board appointed by the Government. The current board is chaired by a barrister, James Ridge; the other members are Patrick Fitzgerald, a barrister, John Fanagan and Philomena Donnelly, both teachers, and Kay Ryan, a journalist. They were all appointed in 1997.
The board does not have power to seize a publication; it can only act on a complaint from a member of the public, the gardai or a customs-and-excise officer. Complaints must be in writing and must be accompanied by copies of the publication.
"Indecent" is defined in the Act as "suggestive of, or inciting to, sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave". There are guidelines and regulations which the board follows. You'd think how and why a publication is banned would be straightforward enough - just follow the letter of the law and you can't go wrong. However, "immoral" is not an absolute; it's open to interpretation, and how you interpret depends on all sorts of things.
Perhaps the members of the censorship board believed the ads in In Dublin would incite immorality. But we don't know - and as the law stands we have no right to know: the members of the board are not legally bound to explain their decision. The publisher, however, can appeal the decision. In the case of In Dublin, publisher Mike Hogan was granted a judicial review, and in court gave an undertaking that the ads would no longer appear. The judicial review will take place in about six months' time; meanwhile ,the ban on In Dublin has been lifted.
It has been suggested that the sort of secrecy surrounding censorship in Ireland is not acceptable in a democratic society. The original Censorship of Publications Act was enacted in 1929. Since then we have had amending legislation in 1946 and 1967, but little has actually changed since the first piece of law.
Historically, it was formulated at a time when the Catholic Church was very influential in the State. For decades, there was a general fear here of ideas considered "foreign" and immoral. This fear influenced decisions to ban many publications, among them, ironically, some of the most important Irish literary works of the 20th century - everyone from James Joyce to Edna O'Brien, Brendan Behan and John McGahern suffered at the hands of the censor.
Publications are still banned in Ireland today, but generally they are titles which could reasonably be argued to be pornographic, and the censorship receives little media attention. However, a recent controversial decision banned Madonna's Sex, a book of explicit photographs of herself and others, published in 1992.
Work in the Irish language has, for some reason, always fared very well. While Frank O'Connor's translation of Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court was banned, the original Irish version of the poem was left in circulation - and was even on the school syllabus.
