Ireland is moving 12,000 banned books from a secret room in the Department of Justice on St Stephen’s Green to the National Archives as part of the repeal of the country’s censorship laws.
For almost a century, an Irish government building in Dublin hosted a banned books room that was closed to public access. The shelves held 12,000 volumes deemed indecent or obscene by the Censorship of Publications Board. The collection included works by authors such as Harold Robbins, Edna O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde, DH Lawrence, and F Scott Fitzgerald.
The collection spans from 1926 to 1996 and contains pulp fiction, high-brow literature, and academic texts. Banned titles featured The Picture of Dorian Gray, Behan’s Borstal Boy, and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Shelves also held paperbacks with titles like The Baby Doll Murders and A Doctor and his Mistress, alongside scholarly works such as Sexual Life in England Past and Present.
Did You Know? The nascent Irish Free State established the Committee of Evil Literature in 1926 as a five-man panel tasked with protecting public morals, which recommended a strict vetting system that led to the creation of the Censorship of Publications Board.
The entire collection of periodicals and books is being moved after Christmas to the National Archives for conservation, cataloguing, and storage. Officials transferred the censors’ registers, notes, and letters from the public and interest groups this week. These documents are undergoing conservation before becoming publicly available for the first time.
Many volumes are vulnerable first editions that will not be available directly to the public, though Orlaith McBride noted people can source them online and in bookshops.
“Many are first editions, and because of sheer age in a vulnerable state, so they won’t be available to the public,” said McBride, the director of the National Archives. “They are the most interesting because they record the decisions and reveal the thinking behind the bans.”
The Censorship of Publications Board applied a broad definition to indecency and obscenity that encompassed references to family planning, contraception, and violence. Censors also targeted suggestive imagery, such as the cover of O’Brien’s 1960 novel The Country Girls. “The issue wasn’t just the contents but the image,” McBride said.
Brian Hughes, a history lecturer at the University of Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College, explained that the board reviewed materials submitted by the public, customs officers, and a subscription to the Times Book Club. “I think people would be very surprised seeing these books or reading some of these books to think that they were banned at all in the first place, because attitudes are quite different now,” Hughes said.
The censors’ registers, notes, and letters from the public and interest groups were transferred during the week of the announcement.
The 12,000 banned books were kept in a room inside the Department of Justice building on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin.
The National Archives, directed by Orlaith McBride, will conserve, catalogue, and store the collection following its move.
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