Manuals of Immorality: Censoring publications in twentieth-century Ireland

A free public talk by Dr Aoife Bhreatnach, hosted by Dublin City Council's Heritage Office. Part-funded by the Heritage Council.

About the talk

The scale and ambition of the Irish censorship regime is preserved in a blacklist of over 12,000 publications. From 1930 to 2016, the censorship board banned all manner of printed material. Sex education manuals, pulp fiction, nineteenth-century pornography, celebrity memoirs, and newspapers and magazines appear alongside literature from the greatest twentieth-century writers. This state censorship emerged from the report of the Committee on Evil Literature (1926), which gathered opinions from churchmen of all persuasions, newsagents, charities, trade unions and civil servants. The moral attitudes of the committee’s final report permeated the first Censorship of Publications Act in 1929. Through case studies of banned publications, this lecture will explore how sexuality and reproduction terrified Irish censors who believed banning advice manuals such as Married Love by Marie Stopes would protect children. John McGahern, famously censored in 1965, called the system ‘cruel, inhuman and fascistic’. It was also extraordinarily long-lived – In Dublin Magazine was banned in 1999 and the last book was added to the blacklist in 2016. This lecture will explore how censorship worked, who collaborated and who resisted, and how it profoundly affected human relationships in twentieth-century Ireland.

About the speaker

Dr Aoife Bhreatnach is a researcher, writer and podcaster. She writes and presents Censored podcast, which explores the censorship culture of twentieth-century Ireland. In each episode, Aoife tells the story of a book that was banned in Ireland, reading out the rude bits and rating the filth through censorship bingo. The podcast, with over 90,000 downloads, was one of the Dublin Book Festival ‘Literary Podcasts We Love Right Now’ in 2021. In seasons 10 and 11, Aoife was joined by Dr Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston to watch and review some of the filthy films banned in Ireland. She has written about censorship for the Irish Examiner and Irish Times while her historical writing includes thirteen articles and a book, Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State (2006). Her creative writing appears in Howl, The Stinging Fly and in Radio na Gaeltachta’s ‘Aistí ón Aer’. In 2025, she was a recipient of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize. She is currently writing a book on living in a censored Ireland.

About the series

The Dublin City Heritage Series is a free public lecture series which aims to showcase heritage projects, topics and new research across Dublin city, and is an action of the Dublin City Strategic Heritage Plan 2024 - 2029.

The series has received grant support from the Heritage Council.

This talk will be recorded and made available online at a later date.

ISL interpretation will be provided.