Censorship in the Irish Free State and its implications for Irish Art

Censorship and the nation state are inextricably connected. Referring to the imposition of censorship legislation in Australia in 1901, Nicole Moore notes how it enabled an ‘administrative cordon’ to be drawn around the country, providing a unifying feature of the newly post-colonial nation. In the Irish Free State official censorship was similarly an attempt to ‘delimit, institute and form the nation’s knowledge’.1 Censorship legislation also reinforced the wider process of ‘normalising’ society after a period of civic strife and of enforcing a stable image of Irish identity from which dissenting elements could be excluded.2 While visual art was not subjected to official censorship in Ireland this chapter argues that the wider climate of institutional censorship had a major impact on its production, both in terms of the subjects that artists chose to address and in the style and manner in which they did so.