We deserve a pat on the back, we really do.This week, Ireland took another step on the long, hard road towards “modernity” and “progress” by officially changing the name and function of the Irish Film Censors Office.
Henceforth, the organisation will be known as the Irish Film Classification Office.
That change of one word says it all.
No longer will we be engaged in the prurient, grubby and . . . censorious work of, er, censorship.
From now on the job of our erstwhile film censor will be merely to ‘classify’, to alert us to the content of the film, to tell parents what movie is appropriate to what age group.
Exit stage right, James Montgomery, our authoritarian first film censor.
Enter stage left, John Kelleher, our kinder, gentler, more enlightened and more tolerant film ‘classifier’.
And so, Ireland becomes a better place, one that has officially brought to an end the old regime that couldn’t tolerate a cinematic display of female flesh in favour of one that lets it all hang out, so to speak.
Before we break out the bubbly, however, let’s have a bit of a history lesson. It always helps to get the facts straight before doing the usual thing of mindlessly condemning Old Ireland and praising New Ireland.
Here’s the first fact. When Ireland became independent in 1922 and set up the office of film censor soon after, censorship was common throughout the Western world. The only thing unusual about us is that we took to it with such fervour.
Here’s a second one. The reason we embraced it so fervently is precisely because we were newly independent. Back then, that meant not being open to foreign influences including those imported via books and movies. All newly autonomous countries are extremely idealistic. The precise hopes and aspirations vary according to the time and place, but the best way to make a new country conform to the vision of its founders is to deliberately exclude the visions or practices of others.
A third fact. While the Catholic church was an avid supporter of censorship, the Church of Ireland was barely less enthusiastic. This is from the Church of Ireland Gazette in 1925: “There is no more insidious danger to public and private morals than the cinematograph . . . Cinema shows are visited by people of every class and every walk of life . . . For that reason it is highly important that films should be subjected to a strict censorship.”
As Mary Kenny explains in her brilliant and under-appreciated book, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, the debate over censorship was non-sectarian. Commenting on a debate that took place in the Dail in 1928, the Gazette opined: “Protestants and Catholics spoke in favour of the bill; Protestants and Catholics criticised it.”
The major disagreement was not over whether censorship should take place, but how strict it should be.
The final fact. It wasn’t only the Catholic church and the Church of Ireland that backed censorship: so did the nationalist leadership of the country as well as Free Staters. Douglas Hyde, a protestant let’s not forget, was a supporter.
I think we can safely say at this point that there was no way Ireland, post-independence, was not going to have a strict regime of censorship. Indeed, it is equally likely that if many of the people reading this paper today had been alive and kicking back then, they too would have supported censorship as they now back its lifting.
It was the spirit of the time and most of us, by definition, are inhabited by the spirit of whatever time we happen to live in. Indeed, I would be amazed if there are 100 people reading this column who would have opposed censorship 80-odd years ago.
Most of the early opposition came from artists, which makes sense because it was their work, after all, which was not being seen. But some of them were entirely hypocritical about the matter.
For example, as Kenny reminds us, Sean O’Casey opposed censorship here but supported it in the Soviet Union where the custom was to censor people by killing them.
Montgomery did use the old censor’s scissors with abandon but, as far as historians can ascertain, he never used it on people.
Announcing the change to the name of our former film censors office last week, justice minister Dermot Ahern, dutifully reading from the script prepared for him by a civil servant, declared that we are now a “mature society” in which “adults should be free . . . subject to the limits of the law, to decide for themselves what they may see”.
Don’t you just love the condescension? As we become more ‘liberal’ we become more ‘mature’ and as we become less ‘liberal’ we become less ‘mature’. What a load of self-serving bunkum. Mature by what definition? Check out the movies we actually watch and then ask yourself if they are the mark of a mature society. Meet the Spartans, just out on DVD, would be an excellent place to start.
Half the movies in the cinema are deliberately low-brow and crude. When done well, as in the case of Dumb and Dumber, this can be quite funny. But let’s not pride ourselves on our maturity as we fill cinemas to watch these films. Irish people nearly three generations ago might have been more censorious in certain respects than they are now, but I’ll bet in other respects their tastes were more high-brow and more ‘mature’ — to use that awful word — than they are in 2008.
But just as people 80 years ago were more censorious in some aspects, we are more so in other ways. The Irish Times, in a leader last Wednesday, reacted in its usual knee-jerk way by bleating on about how attitudes towards freedom of expression have changed so much for the better.
Really?
We may be a lot more tolerant about sex and violence in the movies, but if liberal Ireland is totally supportive of freedom of expression, then why isn’t it currently championing Kevin Myers?
The Immigrant Council of Ireland is trying to have the newspaper columnist charged with incitement to hatred because of a piece he wrote that is fiercely critical of giving aid to Africa.
That is censorship of a particularly sinister kind.
Ireland may be less ‘prudish’ about sex but the new prudes, the leftist ones who have succeeded the old nationalist and religious puritans, are perfectly willing to suppress freedom of expression if they think someone is being ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘ageist’.
So, on second thoughts, let’s spare ourselves that pat on the back.
We still believe in censorship.
The only difference is that the people doing the censoring have changed and so have the things we want to censor.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce