JUST HALF a century ago Mighty Mouse, Batmanand Popeyewere "not recommended"and Bugs Bunnycomic books were "doubtful".
Such was the view of a key member of the Censorship of Publications Board, an Irish Centre for Human Rights Conference heard this week in Galway.
It is thanks to the diaries kept by Christopher O’Reilly from the early 1950s that a unique insight could be given into the mind of the censor, NUI Galway lecturer Dr Julia Carlson and bookseller Des Kenny told the second Irish-American Human Rights Exchange conference.
O’Reilly lectured at St Patrick’s teachers’ training college in Drumcondra, Dublin, was a supreme knight in the Knights of Columbanus and a member of the five-man board by the then minister for justice in 1951.
The year 1954 was a “key year” for O’Reilly and his fellow censors, Mr Kenny said. Some 85 per cent of books examined were banned.
He recalled how at the time his parents Des and Maureen Kenny were trying to establish an independent bookshop in Galway in such a “stultifying atmosphere”.
There was a “very angry reaction in Connemara” when one of Walter Macken’s banned books appeared on the shop’s list. It was ironic that Macken and Graham Greene were among the most Catholic writers of that period, yet they were both banned, Mr Kenny said.
The censorship board always had a representative of the Catholic church, and one Trinity College, Dublin, representative was “always a Protestant”, but the Protestant vote could be disregarded in the voting – which allowed for four votes in favour of banning.