There are many victims in the story of twentieth-century literary censorship in Ireland. Contrary to popular belief, Ulysses was not banned in Ireland, but that may have owed more to the fact that the Censorship of Publications Board had not yet come into being. Established in the aftermath of the published findings of the ludicrously titled 1926 ‘Committee on Evil Literature’, Ireland’s censorship board would prove unrivalled in their eagerness to remove books from shelves. Few believed the censors even read much of what they rejected, with Senator John Keane noting in 1942:

 In the 13 years during which the Act has been in operation, some 1,600 books have been censored; that is an average of three a week. I ask this question: Is it conceivable that the censors, who are not remunerated and many of whom have other occupations, can possibly read — as they should read if they are to do their duty conscientiously in deciding whether a book infringes the definition of indecency — three books a week in addition to other books which they read and which have not been banned?

There were varying reactions to having a book banned in Ireland. For some, it was a badge of honour. Brendan Behan questioned how a group of ‘country yobs, so-called Civil Servants, sitting in a room in Merrion Square’ could be judge, jury and executioner on his publications, before finding that having a book banned in Ireland did wonders for sales abroad. Yet for every author who thrived on their reputation as a ‘banned Irish writer’ somewhere else, there were others whose careers were severely impacted at home.

The novelist Norah Hoult fell victim to the board on no less than ten occasions, and was an obscure figure in Ireland until republication in recent times. Lives and livelihoods were rocked too, as schoolteacher John McGahern experienced with the banning of his novel The Dark. There was widespread condemnation of that decision, with Samuel Beckett writing to him to express his disgust with the Censorship of Publications Board. McGahern recalled that ‘I wrote back to thank him, but said I didn’t want any protest. If it wasn’t for Mr Beckett writing to me I wouldn’t have even been asked. I was secretly ashamed. Not because of the book, but because this was our country and we were making bloody fools of ourselves.’

Crucially, the Board was not required to reveal its reasoning behind the censorship of any publication, while authors had no means of appeal until later reforms. Politics motivated some decisions, like the 1930 novel House of Gold, penned by the former Communist Party member Liam O’Flaherty. Deeply hostile to the emerging Irish Free State, which he viewed as a betrayal of the promise of the revolutionary era, his novel pours scorn on the ‘gombeen ascendancy’ that had come to power. In the case of other writers, ‘moral’ issues were undoubtedly the central factor.

The Country Girls, published in 1960, marked the arrival of Edna O’Brien. Written in just three weeks in her late twenties, she would recall in her memoir that ‘I cried a lot writing The Country Girls but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed that our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old…’ A defining coming of age story, the book was warmly received upon release, with the Irish Press review praising the plot and the evocative language of O’Brien:

Two country girls cycle together to a village school, they pass on to become unladylike young ladies in a boarding school, they leave school, come to work in the city, and grow up. That is the core of Edna O’Brien’s quite remarkable first novel, The Country Girls. The climate of the book is sun-showery, the flavour bitter-sweet. Childhood passes, girls grow up, a family is torn apart by tragedy, a farm decays. Girls are by turns naughty, ecstatic, tender. Miss O’Brien balances the lights and shadows of feverish adolesence.

Reflecting on the historic importance of the novel, writer Eimear McBride notes that ‘O’Brien’s invocation of female characters who dared desire more from life than domestic and sexual servitude, emotional disaffection and intellectual abnegation was nothing short of revolutionary.’

What offended O’Brien’s opponents was not alone the depictions of female sexuality and desire, but the image of an Irish society that was far from idylic, and the desire of young people to break free from its constraints. When asked if the novel was autobiographical, O’Brien struck on an important truth; that many young women would recognise themselves in it. ‘The novel is autobiographical insofar as I was born and bred in the west of Ireland, educated at a convent, and was full of romantic yearnings, coupled with a sense of outrage.’

The first in a trilogy of novels, The Country Girls was followed by The Lonely Girl in 1962, and an intensification in the condemnation around the young writer. It was the second book which led Dublin’s Catholic Archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, to bring O’Brien’s work directly to the attention of Minister for Justice Charles Haughey. The Minister, he noted approvingly, ‘like so many decent Catholic men with growing families, was just beaten by the outlook and descriptions.’ O’Brien would later find humour in McQuaid’s obsessions with cultural purity, writing in her memoir that ‘the negative influences with which he was obsessed were British newspapers, evil literature, communism and foreign soccer players. The cinema too was a hotbed of iniquity.’ There was little funny about McQuaid’s witchhunt in the heat of the moment, however. In addition to condemnation of the book in the press, copies of the book were burnt by a curate at the church in her native parish. O’Brien later recounted that her own mother had ‘taken a pen with black ink and had inked out every offending word in the book. I found the book in a bolster case after my mother had died. I was so angry.’

Almost none of the books that fell foul of the Censorship of Publications Board were published in Ireland, suggesting a fear amongst publishers of its scope and ruthlessness. O’Brien would not be the first or last Irish writer to relocate to pursue a literary career elsewhere. In explaining her decision to leave Ireland for London, she related how ‘pity arose too, pity for a land so often denuded, pity for a people reluctant to admit that there is anything wrong. That is why we leave. Because we beg to differ.’

Significantly, she remained a voice in Irish life, and a critic of censorship who used the international influence she had to focus attention on it. It was reported in 1966 that ‘Edna O’Brien, the Clare-born authoress, landed at Dublin Airport on Saturday night with five copies of her books. She left the airport holding only the dust jackets of her novels. The customs officials had confiscated the books.’ O’Brien participated in the launch of the Censorship Reform Society in Dublin in December 1966, the press reporting on the speakers that ‘twelve men and Edna O’Brien declared that the system branded authors as pornographers, obscene and indecent.’ The public campaigning of O’Brien and others was instrumental in bringing about reform in the manner in which the Censorship of Publications Board operated. From 1967, bans on publications would expire after a period of twelve years, and authors finally had a mechanism to appeal censorship. The immediate effect of this reform was the unbanning of thousands of books.

Amidst the sea of literary obituaries, one could easily have missed the tweet of Danny Morrison, author and former republican prisoner, who recalled how ‘Edna never forgot the political prisoners. She visited me in the H-Blocks, wrote and sent books.’ O’Brien was a vocal critic of censorship around reporting on the Northern Irish conflict, remembering how her interview with West Belfast MP Gerry Adams led to a moment where some were ‘openly intemperate and an MP at a gathering told me that he would bring back hanging for the likes of me.’ Censorship, on the grounds of sexual morality or politics, was wrong in O’Brien’s eyes.

O’Brien’s commitment to the undoing of censorship in Ireland in all its forms recalls earlier writers, like the Civil War veterans Peadar O’Donnell and Seán Ó Faoláin, who used their magazine The Bell to draw attention to the need for reform. To O’Donnell, ‘a board of censors of really formidable backwardness’ had ruled for long enough. They lamented a situation where ‘our writers merely draw the material for their work from Irish life but find their public abroad.’ It would be a writer abroad who would play no small role in undoing that broken system. Ireland owes much to Edna O’Brien.