After Nearly a Century, Ireland's Room of Banned Books Sees the Light as Collection Moves to National Archives

For almost a century, a government building in the heart of Dublin, Ireland's capital, has hosted a secret sanctum: the banned books room. The Department of Justice building on St Stephen's Green did not grant public access, because its shelves held 12,000 books deemed indecent or obscene.

It was a graveyard for titles condemned by the Censorship of Publications Board, which banned anything that smelled of sex or other corruptions.

Harold Robbins was interred there. So too were Ian Fleming, Edna O'Brien, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, Iris Murdoch, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many more.

Now, exhumation is nigh. The entire collection is to be moved to the National Archives as part of the repeal of Ireland's censorship laws. The censors' notes, minutes and ledgers detailing why each book was banned will be made publicly available for the first time — a trove for researchers of social history and state control.

"The censors prohibited works that they saw as contravening or subverting public morality — anything that was seen as unwholesome or suggestive of sexual immorality," said Orlaith McBride, the director of the National Archives. "It was often just the innuendo of something that could have been perceived as likely to corrupt or deprave."

The volumes span 1926 to 1996 and encompass pulp fiction, high-brow literature and academic texts. References to family planning, contraception and violence were likely to elicit bans, McBride said.

Suggestive imagery could also trigger a ban, not just a book's contents. On the cover of O'Brien's groundbreaking 1960 novel The Country Girls, McBride said: "It's very subtly done but you can see the contours of the female form. The issue wasn't just the contents but the image."

Banned titles included classics such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Behan's Borstal Boy and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, as well as pulpy paperbacks such as The Baby Doll Murders. Scholarly tomes such as Sexual Life in England Past and Present also ended up in what was informally called the banned books room.

In 1926, soon after independence, the nascent Irish Free State established the Committee of Evil Literature, a five-man panel tasked with protecting public morals. It recommended a strict system of vetting that led to the Censorship of Publications Board — which, for a time, was led by a Catholic priest — and an appeals board.

The books will be moved after Christmas to the National Archives, where they will be conserved, catalogued and stored. McBride said many are first editions and, because of their age, in a vulnerable state, so they will not be available directly to the public. The censors' registers and notes, plus letters from the public and interest groups, were transferred this week and are undergoing conservation before becoming publicly available. "They are the most interesting because they record the decisions and reveal the thinking behind the bans," McBride said.