" THE IRISH CENSORSHIP"
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Six, _Most Governments exercise some sort of censorship over publications sold within the area of their jurisdiction. The sale, or sending through the post, of indecent books, indecent photographs or pictures, and the publication of indecent details of divorce cases in the Press, is prohibited in this country.
Many think that this prohibition might with advantage be extended to the reporting of cases of incest, of the procura- tion of abortion, of misconduct in the public parks, and to the rest of the pathological matter that takes up so much space in some of our Sunday newspapers ; and that adver- tisements of abortefacient pills, contraceptive appliances, and remedies for internal disorders, etc., should be debarred from appearing in the lay Press. If the Government of the Irish Free State should take action on these lines, every healthy-minded Irishman will support them.
But it is obvious, from Mr. William McCarthy's letter in your issue of the 6th inst. that such action is not what he contemplates. - So wide is his ban that the great bulk of Classical, Renaissance, and modern art and literature, as well as much of our modern biological science, comes under it. -
In his preface to " The Golden Journey to Samarkand." Flecker wrote :
"It is not the poet's business to save man's soul, but to make it worth saving. . . . Art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them."
These doctrines find no echo in the mind of Mr. McCarthy.
Rather does he seem to subscribe to the old syllogism, " It is given to only a chosen few to resist temptation ; knowledge is a great temptation, therefore all but the chosen few are better kept in ignorance." What does it matter if nine out of every ten of the Irish people never open a book (a statement which I do not for an instant believe)—" one saint," writes
Mr. McCarthy, " is worth-all the cant of art, science, and literature."
Sex, writes Mr. McCarthy, is a thing ," which every decent man and woman endeavours daily to throw overboard, and to be rid of it . . . savouring of the beasts of the field- and not of humanity." Doubtless, Mr. McCarthy has at heart the moral, intellectual and physical progress of the Irish people. How does he propose to ensure this without sexual activities ?
The human race, even the Gaelic fraction of it, has not yet attained to parthenogenesis. If sex is all that Mr. McCarthy writes, surely the proper and logical course for all of us is-to join the " Skoptski," rid ourselves of our incubus, and bring the human race to an end, thus solving all the problems that worry Mr. McCarthy, and occasionally even.—I am, Sir, &c.
PADRAIG UA IfEICHTHIGHEARNAN.
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