IPPN

Published: 18 December 2010

After 80 years of censorship from a board once internationally notorious for its prurience, the last remaining book to be banned in Ireland on the grounds of obscenity will have its prohibition lifted this year, writes John Byrne

NOT MUCH would appear to link Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley’s satirical 1928 dynamiting of the foibles of the British intelligentsia, and The Base Guide to London, “an educational guide to surviving . . . the seedy side” of the English capital, from 1998. Separated by 70 years, a World War and radical changes in social mores, they may seem strange bedfellows, but these two titles represent the alpha and omega of book censorship by the State.

On May 9th, 1930, a year after the passing of the initial Censorship of Publications Act, Huxley’s novel became the act’s first casualty. Banned on the grounds that it was “indecent and obscene”, it earned the dubious historical honour of being recorded as the first entry in the first volume of the Register of Prohibited Publications. Sixty-eight years and 12,491 prohibitions later, The Base Guide remains the final entry in the register’s final volume.

In the 12 years since this last prohibition, the Censorship of Publications Board – at one time internationally notorious for its prurience and moral conservatism – has not banned a single title. It’s the longest such interval in the history of the State and a remarkable statistic for a body whose ceaseless opposition to “indecency”, “obscenity” and family planning saw it issue 1,034 prohibitions in one particularly zealous year (1954).

More importantly, as the decade’s end approaches, 80 years on from the censorship board’s first meeting, a landmark in the history of Irish censoriousness will have been reached. Under the terms of the 1967 Censorship of Publications Act, books deemed “indecent or obscene” have their prohibitions revoked after 12 years.

 

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