'The best banned in the land': Censorship and Irish writing since 1950

The cloud of state censorship that had cast a shadow over the Irish literary
landscape since I930 eventually began to lift in the late I96os. The appeals
mechanism introduced in I946 had undone some of the worst excesses of the
early years of censorship (to largely symbolic effect, as most of the titles were
out of print), but the first signs of liberalization did not appear until the late
1950s, when control of the Censorship Board was wrested from the Catholic
Action cabal that had run it since the beginning. The improvement was
limited and Irish writers continued to regard the censorship of their work as
an occupational hazard; indeed, as the list of banned writers contained the
majority of the greatest contemporary writers in the English language, inclusion on the register was seen by some as an inverted badge of honour. The
controversies generated by the banning of works by John McGahern and
Edna O'Brien in the I96os helped fuel the movement for reform, and in 1967
the censorship legislation was overhauled. This resulted in the gradual
unbanning of the Irish books on the list over the next twelve years, and also
marked the end of the censorship of Irish writers, with the sole exception of
Lee Dunne, who carried the flag into the I970S.