Lenihan saw laws as an embarrassment

ALTHOUGH the phrase "an Irish solution to an Irish problem" was not coined, it would aptly fit Mr Brian Lenihan's initiative to undo the excesses of literary censorship which he inherited as Minister for Justice.

Having first reformed film censorship in 1964-65, Mr Lenihan turned his attention to print censorship.

He believed - as he put it in a memorandum to Cabinet - "standards of propriety do change" and had changed greatly in Ireland in the previous 20 years. He considered that "the finality of a ban on a book on the ground that it is `indecent or obscene' is indefensible in principle".

The newly released files show the Minister acknowledged that the system then was an embarrassment and that "many books stand banned which are recognised the world over as being of considerable literary merit".

The memorandum acknowledged that before the appointment of an entirely new censorship board in 1957, the previous incumbents had been "in general, extremely narrow in their outlook" and had been especially prone to ban books by Irish authors".

Although many of "their worst decisions" were overturned by the appeal board, there were "still a number of books banned for all time under the law as it stands whose presence on the register can only reflect discredit on the whole system of censorship".

Mr Lenihan decided the simplest expedient was "to put a time limit on any ban made on the ground that the book was indecent or obscene".

He favoured a limit of 20 years, after which nearly all of the banned books would "be completely unobtainable (being, in the main, cheap paperbacks of no literary merit) and the board would be able to deal with those books available and still considered to be pernicious by the simple process of rebanning".

The Minister admitted to his government colleagues that he expected some opposition, clerical and lay" to his proposals but considered that "the effectiveness of the censorship system in preventing the circulation of really undesirable books would be preserved while, at the same time, books still available after 20 years and which must, therefore, be presumed to have some merits, would deservedly get fresh consideration".

A FURTHER indication of Mr Lenihan's thinking can be gleaned from his espouse to a query from the Taoiseach. Mr Lemass asked whether it would not be "a logical extension of this principle to prohibit the board from banning a book which was first published more than 20 years ago?"

Mr Lenihan thought this naive although he did not say so in as many words. He argued that the Lemass suggestion would leave the government "open to be attacked on the ground that it would permit the prohibition only of recent books and those only for a short time, whereas there are, in the view of very many people, lots of books that are intrinsically bad yet liable to endure".

He went so far as to say that rather than adopt the Lemass proposal "it would be better to do away with the Censorship Acts altogether (leaving pornography to the criminal law)".

Mr Lenihan's reforms of film and literary censorship - although modest - must be considered in the prevailing climate. When his reforms were first mooted, they drew a response from Dr Cornelius Lucey, Bishop of Cork, who reckoned the then censorship laws were too lax. He advocated change in the other direction, specifically calling for it to be an offence to publish corrupting works. This would make authors, publishers and booksellers "think twice about taking the risk that can be securely and profitably taken as things are

Yet it was Mr Lenihan and not Dr Lucey who had caught the prevailing mood, and in the following year, as the legislation was being enacted, the Minister introduced the further reform that any ban would lapse after 12 years rather than his original notion of 20.

None of the Minister's reforms extended to publications advocating the unnatural prevention of conception, as he believed "the problem of changing standards" did not arise in this category.