CENSORSHIP:THE OFFICE of the attorney general was advised in 1956 that the "technical difficulties" were too great to sue The Irish Timesover a leading article criticising the Censorship of Publications Board.
The editorial, published on April 4th, 1956, accused the five-member board of being behind the seizure of the British Sunday newspaper the Observer, which had carried an article on birth control in its latest edition.
The Irish Timeswrote: "Did the Customs officers who seized the copies of last Sunday's Observer act under orders from the Censorship Board? If so, those orders were illegal . . . It would take a multitude of denials on the part of the Censorship Board to convince the public that the board did not order the seizure."
Files now released through the National Archives contain a legal opinion dated May 9th, in which William O'Brien Fitzgerald SC writes that, "there is no practical way in which The Irish Timescould be made legally answerable".
The paper's charge that the board had ordered the Observerseizure was "completely without foundation" and the further claim that this was done illegally was "undoubtedly a serious reflection on the board".
But since the board was neither a corporate body nor a trading corporation, it was "not a competent plaintiff in a civil proceeding".
Even if a viable case could be brought, Mr Fitzgerald suggested that the level of damages would be affected by the fact that, if the board had the power to prohibit the distribution of the Observer, it would have done so.
The same file from the attorney general's office includes correspondence with the Department of Justice over a comment in the "Irishman's Diary" column of The Irish Timeson June 16th, 1939 which the censorship board considered as "a serious libel on them".
The newspaper item noted that the board had banned a US publication entitled True because it "devoted an unduly large proportion of space to the publication of matters relating to crime". The column goes on: "Some day, when they have a moment to spare from the perusal of dirty books, the Big Five might spare a half-hour or so reading the Censorship of Publications Act 1929!"
The Diarist, "Quidnunc" (then Patrick Campbell), published an apology on June 27th acknowledging that the law did prohibit publications which were adjudged to devote excessive space to criminal matters. The board was not satisfied with the apology. However, the advice from the attorney general's office was that, "while it might well be objected that the form of correction employed is qualified in form and lacking in grace", nevertheless it would be "hard to contend that it was not in fact a correction and an apology".
The board in 1939 was chaired by the Very Rev Canon Boylan, who described its main function as being "to keep the filth of modern romance out of the country".