CENSORSHIP IN IRELAND
SIR,—I have just made the discovery that opinions ex- pressed by the Dublin censor may be effective even outside the area--the Twenty-six Counties—in which his writ runs. The Sunday Times of January 18 con- tained an article by Mr. Gordon Rattray Taylor for the centenary of Havelock Ellis's birth, and promised a second and concluding article for the following Sunday. When I looked for this in the issue of January 25—in the copy of the Sunday Times, that is, which I bought here in Derry—I was disappointed not to find it, and I wrote to inquire. The Editor of the Sunday Times writes to me under date January 28: 'I regret to have to say, in reply to your postcard, that as a result of criticism by the Irish censor of the first
article on Havelock Ellis, we omitted the second article from the Irish edition in order to avoid de- priving our Irish readers of the rest of the paper. I am sending you a copy of another edition under separate cover with our compliments.' I must assume that 'the Irish censor is the censor at Dublin.
I very much appreciated the Editor's double courtesy—in answering my question so fully and in sending the missing article—and I can see the kind of distributive difficulties the paper would have to face, in view of our tortuous land frontier and inter- locking transport systems, if it were to try to circu- late one set of copies in the Twenty-six and another in the Six Counties, which amount after all to only a sixth of the area of Ireland. Nor do I claim for a moment any monopoly of virtue and freedom for Northern Ireland—we have here, too (perhaps per- force, I don't know), a certain amount of censorship, in some political matters for instance; and to such things as the Dublin censor presumably criticises in the case of Havelock Ellis the same laws and limita- tions would apply here in Ulster as in England (you will. remember the suppression of Boccaccio at Swindon, and dare I whisper Lolita?). But, apart from all that, we here are also now liable, it seems, to be shielded from what the Dublin censor, too, may con- sider to he dangerous knowledge. It may be of some general interest that the benevolent protection he offers can extend in circumstances to the whole of Ireland.—Yours faithfully.
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