.Now every right-thinking person can tell you that censorship as practised in Ireland when De Valera was in power was something awful.Not one in a hundred will tell you that censorship of publications in Ireland preceded Fianna Fail’s ac cession to power. Indeed Maurice Manning’s party introduced legislation against indecent literature in the 1920s under which Borstal Boy, a moral masterpiece of compassion and rage against injustice, was later banned.But Cumann na nGael* under Cosgrave did not introduce censorship to Ireland. The Defence of the Realm Act and other acts passed at Westminster did that.Stormont, a House of Cards run by Cads used have its own ways of suppression facts and opinions.I remember a critic of the Republic’s censorship, who,visiting the North, found Stormont’s banning of THE UNITED IRISHMAN rather illiberal. His name was Conor Cruise O’Brien. Well might you echo NoelCoward’s question – “Whatever happened to HIM?”
Incidentally, Britain’s first Film Censor was MP for the Scotland Road Division of Liverpool, T.P. O’Connor the only non-Tory MP for that city and one of the
Redmondite MPs to survive the 1918 General Election. In his role of Censor he incurred the wrath of Marie Stopes, a lady with the self-effacing modesty of
a Bob Geldof. Do you remember Geldof coming on TV to announce that he “always” wore a condom, and wondering why the slimy git didn’t occasionally
change it? Like once every Leap Year, when he took a bath?
Anyhow the suggestion that De Valera and his party were fascistic fellow-travellers is being spread like slurry in THE IRISH TIMES which welcomed
Hitler to power in 1933, and the latter- day Blueshirt, Maurice Manning. And anyone henceforth falling for that suggestio falsi should be taken for a right tit.
I can’t make my mind up about Ruairi Quinn. His contribution to slurring De Valera’s safe navigation of a poorly armed state between a power hostile to it – Britain, ruled by a murderous lying thug, Churchill, and a power potentially hostile, also ruled by the murderous, lying thug, Hitler, is shameful. It echoes the kind of ignorant, anti-Irish propaganda of Max Hastings, in the latter’s volume on the Second World War -“ALL HELL LET LOOSE”. Is Quinn deliberately selling us Porkies , or naively slipping us a Canard? I’d be very careful about accepting Quinn’s pronouncements askKosher.
When the body of a priest murdered by the Black and Tans was found in a Galway bog, it prompted a question as to his killers to the Secretary of State for Ireland in the Commons in 1920. Winston Churchill prompted the Secretary – “say Sinn Feiners.” Conor Cruise O ‘Brien has suggested that William Joyce colluded with the “Tans” in the murder. Joyce was a juvenile in 1920 and, had he been tried, would not have faced the death penalty.
Joyce, so far as I know, was never, as an adult, involved in murder. Certainly he was never tried for the crime. He did express the kind of sentiments echoed by a Blueshirt in the Dail in 1943. Horrible sentiments, but such sentiments, with other targets, fill the columns of the Sunday Independent and occupy much of Ireland’s media. Churchill’s 1945 broadcast commentary might have inspired Maurice Manning’s review. Churchill’s 1920 suggestion that a crime should be falsely attributed to Sinn Fein seems to be a continuing inspiration for propagandists no less nasty than William Joyce.
But I would deplore the vengeful treatment of such propagandists. William Joyce “Lord Haw-Haw” was captured by the British at the end of the war. It would have been wrong, but understandable, if he’d been shot on the spot. But he was taken to London, put on trial and hanged over a year later. His fanatical support of British Imperialism and his later support of the Nazis (after changing citizenship) were wrong-headed, though, like many adherents of such ideas, he was clever. The one thing in his favour is that he had courage and faced his death bravely.
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