The "Hate Speech Bill" & Section 31: Free Speech in Ireland under assault yet again?

The battle for freedom of speech in Irish history resumes yet again.

‘It is a basic issue of freedom of information and expression versus censorship.’ (Michael D. Higgins, Dáil Éireann debate - Tuesday, 1 Feb 1994.)

Helen McEntee’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill

Over the past year or so, the Irish government, led by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, has been pushing forward a ‘Hate Speech’ bill which would radically suppress the freedom of expression of the country’s citizens. Among its expansive powers, the most alarming parts of the bill allow the State:

1. to legislate thought crime — it states persons who merely ‘prepare or possess material’ which is considered not ‘reasonable’, will ‘be presumed, until the contrary is proved’ to be guilty, and liable to 2 years in prison.¹

2. to order search warrants based on hearsay — if someone is ‘suspected’ of Hate Speech the Gardaí will have the right ‘to enter, at any time’ the homes of suspects and seize all of the electronic devices of the suspected and their family members, demanding they ‘give to the member any password necessary or encryption’ to search through personal information for as long as the State sees fit.²

3. and to prosecute regardless of context or impact — the bill states ‘A person may be found guilty of an offence’ of Hate Speech, ‘irrespective of whether the communication of material was successful in inciting hatred’. Here, neither a victim nor evidence of harm is required, meaning prosecution can be largely arbitrary.³

Despite the severity of these and other clauses within the Bill, the media largely remained silent on its significance until international figures such as Elon Musk and others drew attention to it.

Perhaps the lack of interest toward the legislation’s totalitarianism from the media is indicative of their historical erudition — political censorship, totalitarian surveillance and the discarding of civil rights is not new to the Free State — this was commonplace a little over a generation ago. During the Troubles, the anti-National surveillance state suppressed journalists, bullied dissidents and censored books and art considered heretical to the anti-nationalist line of the government.

This is the story of the last time political censorship swept through Irish politics, and how Michael D Higgins, our current President, defeated it.

The Section 31 censorship era

Censorship during the Troubles all began with Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which allowed the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs to prohibit RTÉ from broadcasting ‘any matter that could be calculated to promote the aims’ of a proscribed hate organisation, which could and was used by Ministers to regulate any fair coverage of dissident groups in the monopoly public square of television.⁴

Much like with the vagueness of McEntee’s legislation, the language was so broad it could be used totally arbitrarily against whatever reporting the government didn’t like, leaving an ambiguous chilling effect on programmes like Seven Days and others.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was some sympathy among RTÉ journalists toward Republicanism — as it was the ideology upon which the quite young Republic was founded. As the Civil Rights movement in the North and in the Gaeltacht began to take shape, Minister for Justice Desmond O’Malley began to become hysterical at legitimate reporting:

‘O’Malley, in a letter to his colleague, had complained about certain individuals being allowed to appear on television who were openly identified as members of the IRA: ‘When is this going to stop? Is the RTÉ Authority going to sit back and allow the television and radio stations to be used by this minority to brainwash the public?’⁵

In order to prevent the media from allowing a ‘minority to brainwash the public’, O’Malley decided to start using Section 31 to alter the news so to ‘discourage recruitment to subversive organisations’.⁶

The best early example of the extremity of the censorship climate was that of the scandal surrounding RTÉ reporter Kevin O'Kelly. In 1972, at the dawn of Northern Conflict, O'Kelly interviewed IRA chief of staff Seán Mac Stíofáin for RTÉ. He thought he could abide by the censorship regulations by not televising the conversation, but by reading out a transcript instead.

Unfortunately for O'Kelly, this nuance went unnoticed, and the Government proceeded to arrest him, fire the entire RTÉ authority and sentenced him to three months in prison, effectively for the crime of journalism.⁷

This was easily the most high profile stain in RTÉ history, up until the recent hush money scandal. Worryingly, the overhaul of the authority — as is occurring now — allowed the government to appoint a conspiracy of yes-men journalists who were unlikely to deviate from the anti-Republican line.

The new Head of Current Affairs and Deputy Head of News at RTÉ at this time, Desmond Fisher, would later acknowledge only ‘A minority of RTÉ staff supported the government’s action.’⁸ And yet, as Diarmaid Ferriter notes, journalists remained complicit:

‘The nature of the broadcasting ban was accepted by many, McCann has suggested, 'with a shrug of indifference', probably through a mixture of boredom and resentment at intimidation’⁹

This was only exacerbated after Conor Cruise O'Brien became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in 1973. After positioning himself as a supporter of civil freedoms, the minute he took power O’Brien lived up to his Orwellian namesake and reversed course, initiating what Tim Pat Coogan referred to as ‘one of the greatest U-turns in Irish politics’ and a ‘political eclipse which overcame him’.¹⁰

First, O’Brien introduced ‘The Broadcasting Authority Amendment Act 1976’ which removed the previous legislation’s vagueness, replacing any arbitrary decision-making with explicit prohibition of coverage of Republican groups. In his 1972 speech introducing the Bill, O’Brien made clear his intention was to ‘eliminate’ Nationalism from the public consciousness:

‘These sympathies, these half-sympathies, these equivocations have their roots in history. This is true, but it is not a reason for not trying to eliminate them—as many European nations who also have a history, have eliminated their equivalents—if we now find them to be noxious to our own lives and those of our children. This attitude, understandable enough perhaps in the 1920s and 1930s, seems now, in 1975, surely to have something sickly and retarded about it.’¹¹

Why Republicanism was permissible in the past but in 1975 requires a full-scale De-Nazification project O’Brien does not make clear. But what is transparent is O’Brien’s eagerness in cancelling large swathes of the Irish nation. According to what the public were willing to tell pollsters at the time: 42% of the public supported the motives of the IRA, while 25% remained neutral; 40% supported or were neutral toward the activities of the IRA; 72% were anti-partition and 64% felt Britain should withdraw from the North.¹²

It’s quite clear that at least 40-50% of the population had those ‘sickly and retarded’ sympathies which O’Brien sought to ‘eliminate’, so what was he to do?

Well, the solution appeared to be to simply ramp up the suppression of civil liberties far beyond the hallways of RTÉ. This first became clear during the passage of the Emergency Powers Act, 1976, when O’Brien began boasting to The Washington Post journalist Bernard Nossiter that he planned on using the legislation to persecute teachers, public officials and most importantly journalists who had nationalist sympathies, in order to ‘cleanse the culture’ of republicanism.¹³ As Coogan reports:

‘When Bud Nossiter of the Washington Post, the paper that uncovered Watergate, interviewed O'Brien on these new accelerated laws, his explanation left the American stunned. When asked how he saw these policies implemented, and who would fall victim to them: O'Brien responded by pulling open a drawer in his desk filled with letters to the editor of the Irish Press.’¹⁴

Perhaps O’Brien overstepped a mark here when he singled out The Irish Press, one of the most prestigious and popular papers in the country — and the main Fianna Fáil opposition paper — for banning due to its publishing of Republican letters. Once his censorship fantasies were leaked to the public, a major national backlash ensued, forcing the Fine Gael coalition government to tone down the legislation.¹⁵

Anarcho-Tyranny in Ireland

While the total curtailment of public freedom of speech may have been slightly halted by this scandal, the Cosgrave Fine Gael coalition government still forced through extremely draconian policing through the Emergency Powers Act. The act declared a state of emergency, and in eerily similar fashion to McEntee’s Hate Crime Bill, it allowed the Gardaí to hold suspects for up to 7 days without charge based on ‘suspicion’. As Coogan summarises:

‘the Government sought about bringing in a new battery of laws to proclaim a fresh state of emergency, which included: longer sentences, longer periods of detention, from forty-eight hours to seven days, the introduction of virtual police powers for the army, and a proposal that anybody encouraging or supporting the IRA could be charged. Initially the significance of this last provision escaped most people's notice, including my own.'¹⁶

Of course, Minister for Justice Patrick Cooney argued that criticisms of the Bill’s authoritarianism ‘were not real fears for people unless they are on the side of the enemies of the state’.¹⁷ One can certainly imagine Helen McEntee and her ilk assuring the populace that a ‘400 per cent increase in the numbers held under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act’ — only for Hate Speech — is something only racists and bigots need worry about.¹⁸

Unsurprisingly, as is common with censorship regimes, it turned out a large amount of the population could actually be termed ‘enemies of the state’. One such unlikely example was that of the Head of State, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, who was actually forced to resign from his post as President for opposing the Act’s authoritarian hysteria.¹⁹

The arrest statistics following the Act also demonstrates the State’s blood lust for hunting down and harassing those who sympathised with nationalism: the ratio of those arrested to those charged went from 271 to 181 in 1973; to 1,144 to 150 in 1977 and 1431 to 169 in 1979.²⁰ Despite overall charges falling, arrests had quadrupled.

As one can imagine, this level of arrests made abuse of citizens quite a common tactic, particularly for extracting confessions. In the 1970s about 80% of serious crimes were being ‘solved’ by confessions alone, with many being later retracted in court.²¹ Relevant to this period, O’Brien later wrote gleefully in his autobiography about the Gardaí Heavy Gang’s use of torture in a kidnapping case:

‘the escort started asking him questions and when at first he refused to answer, they beat the shit out of him. Then he told them where Herrema [the victim] was. I refrained from telling this story to [ministerial colleagues] Garret [FitzGerald] or Justin [Keating], because I thought it would worry them. It didn't worry me.’²²

While the brutality of The Troubles marched on, with no end in sight, the censorship stranglehold began to be self-justifying. Despite the fact that the regulations did not appear to be saving lives or carving out a path to peace, establishment figures like O'Brien and much of the newer RTÉ broadcasters — who were increasingly being influenced by the infamous ‘Stickies’ (who we'll get to later) — pushed on with persecuting political activists and private citizens.

Much like the recent spate of street crime, the original era of censorship coincided with a dramatic rise in organised and violent crime. While private journalists and civil society activists were at an ever-looming risk of State suppression, for supposed incitement to violence, an epidemic of violent crime blossomed under Gardaí inaction. Figures like The General, or Martin Cahill, among others began to define Dublin’s Crime Scene. Concurrent to the Section 31 era:

‘From trough to peak, the suicide rate rose 655%; the homicide rate rose 609%; alcohol consumption rose 128%; drug deaths rose 6,115%; and the fertility rate fell 58%.’²³

Stories of political violence by groups who were more favoured by the Section 31 regime began to make headlines nationally. While the horrific crimes of Loyalist paramilitaries in the North are well documented, what is more shocking in my view are the cases of anti-Irish terrorism inflicted on the citizens which the Censorship state claimed to protect.

With little to no recourse from the Southern State, the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) attacked RTÉ studios and slaughtered a popular Irish cabaret band, among other smaller crimes. Most strikingly however, was when UVF car bombs killed 33 people (wounding 300+ more), mostly on Talbot Street (one of the busiest streets of the capital) in the 1974 Dublin Monaghan bombings.

Naturally, the Suppression-State's response to this crime was to blame Irish Republicans. Both the Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave and Leader of Fianna Fáil, Jack Lynch, were on the same page in asserting:

‘The blood of the innocent victims of last Friday's outrage’ was on the hands of ‘every person and every organisation which played any part in the campaign [of violence in the North]’.²⁴

Though usually so eager to highlight Republican atrocities, the State went out of its way to avoid sympathising with its own dead citizens: officials decided not to hold a national day of mourning nor to fly the flag at half mast.

While this ambivalence might be striking, one could at least retort that Section-31 order did at least prohibit the UVF in a similar way that they did Republican groups. However, that could not be said about their treatment of the UDA (Ulster Defence Association). Through their cover name UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters) the paramilitary murdered over 400 Irish Catholic civilians, and yet, they had their spokesman invited onto RTÉ. As Vincent Browne's MaGill reports, during the famous H-Block protests:

‘There was another major incident around this time concerning an interview with Glen Barr and Bernadette McAliskey. Barr was invited on to the programme [Today Tonight] by Tish Barry to give "an overview of Protestant opinion" on the hunger strike.…Barr was to appear, not as another run-the-mill Unionist but as a spokesperson for the UDA’²⁵

In a way that may be identifiable to many people today, the Irish state’s relationship to violent crime and terrorism appeared to be totally lopsided. During the 1970s and 80s, powerful drug gangs began to appear, and organised anti-Irish terrorism was an ever-present on the island. And yet — the focus of the media and State was always directed toward tackling the hate speech of Nationalists, one has to ask, who was cultivating such a strange slant toward public safety?

The influence of the Stickies' Unionism

One such area to analyse is the creative influence of members of Sinn Féin — The Workers' Party, the political wing of the Official IRA, on the media during this era. Many ex-RTÉ employees insist it was enormous during this period, particularly in influential programmes like Today Tonight, and earlier Seven Days.

Despite the OIRA continuing to take part in organised crime, political assassinations and vigilantism (within and outside the Republic), the Officials and SFWP were not so strictly prohibited by Section 31 or treated as a violent group. Their influential cadre of supporters within RTÉ were called ‘the Stickies’, over their use of plastic Easter lily badges, as opposed to the traditional paper of the Provisionals.

Particularly under the programme Today Tonight, which was derogatorily referred to as ‘Stickyline’ by its critics, there was a strong pro-censorship message, highlighting Republican evils and downplaying criticism of the British. Although there was a range of viewpoints, as in the previous Seven Days programme, the bias among the higher ups in the Ned Stapleton cumann was undeniable, particularly during the 1981 Hunger Strike crisis:

‘From its inception the show was associated with people seen as sympathetic to SFWP, among them producer Tish Barry, and programme editor Joe Mulholland from Donegal, a Marxist.

Today Tonight saw the predominance the issue [the Hunger Strikes] should be given. SFWP members were quite clear that “some force had to stand up against the tom-tom drums” of nationalism, and that those politicians who opposed the strike, such as Gerry Fitt, should be given prominence.’²⁶

At first the reporting of Forbes McFaul, Fintan Cronin and the young future President Mary McAleese on Today Tonight provoked outrage, as it actually covered the destitution the protesters experienced. And so, naturally, the Sticky hierarchy axed all three journalists and instead sent Una Claffey, Joe Little and Tish Barry out to Belfast to produce Victims of Violence, a propaganda programme solely devoted to Republican violence, so as to distract from the scandal of the Hunger strikers.²⁷

Who today can think of similar scenarios where broadcasting is heavily censored by journalists themselves, cutting off interviews and programmes due to powerful pressure from on high?

On at least one occasion, getting axed from a single programme was the least of critics’ worries. After continual blacklisting of fair coverage of the Troubles, journalist Fintan Cronin set out to make a programme for Today Tonight in 1985 which would uncover the censorship of Workers' Party ‘freemasonry’ which had stilted programming and silenced opponents ‘through an orchestrated campaign of gossip and innuendo’.²⁸

Working with Mary McAleese and interviewing Charlie Haughey among others, Cronin had obviously poked the wrong censorship bear, and in militant style the shadowy powers of the the stickies had his life ruined:

‘Less politely, Cronin’s files in RTÉ were rifled through and his bank statements stolen, threatening calls were made to his home and to his mother, and RTÉ received bomb threats. The day before the programme went out, Cronin found himself face to face in the RTÉ canteen with a number of men whom he knew to be members of the Official IRA. The group had obviously been invited to lunch by sympathisers among the station’s staff. The same day Cronin’s wife workplace received a bomb threat.’²⁹

The accusation of the Stickies' violent suppression of those who exposed them, at least according to Vincent Browne, did not end in this case. In an exposé MaGill article entitled: ‘The Secret World of SFWP’, the paper accused the military wing of the Officials of having a long line of horrific murders, beatings and criminal offenses, all throughout the 1970s and partially 80s.

It is important to remember the entire premise behind banning Provisional Sinn Féin during this time was that they were the spokesmen for an organisation which carried out horrendous violent crime. While this may seem reasonable in isolation, when put against the power and influence of those linked to the Officials, the legitimacy of the statement becomes a lot more questionable.

While it would be difficult to verify the legitimacy of these accusations at this point, 40+ years later, the fact they were not sued is remarkable.

The remarkable absence of coverage or interest from the media in the crimes of the Officials and militant Unionists — as well as alleged British state involvement in terror attacks on Southern Irish soil — is partially explained by the political allegiance of the media. Based on a range of surveys carried out by Harvard and other elite institutions on the political views of European journalists, sociologist Mary Corcoran has pointed out that ‘Irish journalists appear to regard themselves as substantially more liberal than the news audiences that they serve.’

For instance, when asked to put themselves, and their audience, on a scale where 1 is left and 7 is right, Irish journalists had the widest political disparity of European journalists with their base, with 3.15 and 4.48 respectively.³⁰

As Vincent Browne expressed in the Sunday Tribune in 1992:

‘The media is not reflective of the full range of views and opinions in Irish society…journalists and editors in the main hold views that are representative of a small minority of opinion. Journalists are in the main, very much more liberal in their outlook than is true generally.’³¹

The political party polling data simply demonstrates this gulf between the Irish popular base, and the managers of information even further. In the 1997 June election year, polling was done of journalists political party persuasion which heavily contradicts the first preference views of the populace.

For instance, while 44% of the public favoured Fianna Fáil, only 5.6% of journalists did, and while only 15% of voters supported the Labour and Green parties combined, 44% of journalists did.³² While this survey was done long after the heyday of The Workers Party, one wonders what results it would have produced if it was done during the 1980s.

What remains abundantly clear however, is that the Irish media were generally not representative of the views of and political feelings of the average Irish citizen. It surely would not be a large stretch to assume that when there is such a wide bias in the media toward a certain, pro-Censorship, anti-Republican side — for instance, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Labour Party — that the public are not going to get a fair representation of a conflict as complicated as The Troubles, or even the battle for Freedom of Speech for that matter.

This kind of inconsistency once again highlights the risk of McEntee and the censors handing power over to bureaucrats to decide what is acceptable and what isn’t. The ‘moderators’ will always be biased.

Resistance against censorship

Having said all that, there were those within the stickies, RTÉ and the establishment writ large who sincerely opposed censorship. For starters, SFWP as a party officially opposed Section 31, despite their differences with the Provisionals. While the Industrial Department largely ignored this party principle in their RTÉ coverage, the censorship of the few remaining rogue journalists led to highly contentious labour disputes in the company.

The NUJ (National Union of Journalists) consistently expressed vocal opposition against RTÉ for their implementation of Section 31. In particular, the dismissal of journalist Jenny McGeever over an apparent breach of the Act was strongly protested by Charlie Bird among others, as a violation of journalistic freedoms.³³ Bird, who today has demonstrated his courage through his battle with cancer, proved his legitimacy as a union leader against the censorship regime.

Along with Bird, former Stickies like Patrick Kinsella and Rodney Rice fought within the NUJ against the WUI (Workers’ Union of Ireland) which was totally dominated by Eoghan Harris and SFWP.

Generally speaking however, the journalistic class mostly failed to organise a cohesive movement for achieving victories against Section 31. As a journalist of the time, Colum Kenny says too many ‘a number of supporters of the “Stickies” in RTÉ benefited personally from the fact that they did not rock management’s boat’.³⁴ Instead, the more genuine opposition to censorship came from a more hardened dissident world of cultural activism:

‘The NUJ could have challenged Irish Law. They chose not to….The NUJ found it impossible to persuade any Dublin or mainstream electronic journalist to file an individual complaint, as European law required. Instead, the NUJ case was eventually taken in the name of a reporter from an Irish language radio station located in the remote fastness of the west of Ireland.’³⁵

When one thinks about it, the Irish language broadcasting movement was perfectly equipped to deal with the behemoth of censorship. For activist Gaelgeoirí, the nation has already been severed from our traditional communicative consciousness, our teanga agus nós — and so the battle to escape the Anglocentric féth fiada which censors us from our past has been waged for centuries.

Particularly in the 1960s onwards, the Irish language movement fought against censorship of Gaeilge in the National Broadcasting services, particularly radio. When the native language of the Nation was continually made to play second fiddle to Anglicised presentations, Irish language activists simply built their own illegal pirate radio stations, such as Saor Raidió Chonamara.

The relevance of this to our current discussion of Section 31 was that dissident rebellion seen in the Irish language movement naturally produced the one figure who stood out among the rest as a proponent for unadulterated Free Speech — and that man was our current President, Michael D. Higgins.

As Higgins took office as Minister for Culture and Gaeltacht in 1994 he had the all-important decision as to whether he would renew or repeal Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. In an eerily similar way as Higgins’ responsibility today in whether he should uphold McEntee Censorship Bill, the weight of Free Speech in this country was carried on one man’s shoulders.

While a member of the generally non-Republican Labour Party, Higgins had long demonstrated himself to be a proponent of independence in Irish media and cultural activism. For figures like Higgins, along with seemingly opposite figures like Desmond Fennell and Seán De Fréine, the most pressing concern in Ireland was to strive for cultural independence for the Gael, instead of the modern predominance of homogenising international commercialism. One can imagine how Liberal censorship, particularly by Anglophile figures like O’Brien and Harris, could not gel with such a worldview.

Influenced by the critic of liberalism, Charles Taylor, Higgins felt there was a strong distinction to be made between the fluid, passive conception of the individual as consumer, and the traditional understanding of active citizenship, a pre-requisite for democracy. In a rousing essay about Section 31, titled ‘Culture, democracy and public service broadcasting’, Higgins laid out his fear of the danger of globalised authoritarian censorship which had no regard for our culture and history:

‘We are drifting into, rather than choosing, this new condition of our unfreedom — our existence as consumers rather than citizens. Citizenship, the public space the shared moment, the common history, the shared community of the imagination are all perceived as tired old phrases. A private world of consumer choice and its advertisements have replaced an older but still necessary debate about the adequate provision in the public space. Indeed, I believe we are now living through the early stages of a deep enslavement.’³⁶

For his generation of Gaelic activists, censorship represented the closed mind of Anglicisation, where the Gaels were intellectually neutered and prevented from having independent speech from Britain. One can see the ideological heritage of such a belief in Pádraic Pearse's ‘Murder Machine’ essay. This was the animus for Higgins' launching TG4 as a platform for free Gaelic media. As it was for his ultimate decision in repealing the Section 31 Broadcasting Ban in 1994 as Minister for Culture and Gaeltacht.

As Higgins explained, the battle against Section 31 was deeply imbedded in his life-long battle for an independent, native and free world of open communication and freedom of expression in Irish culture. I quote in full, in order that the reader can fully understand Higgins’ motivations — and so one considers the egregious betrayal it would be of the President’s legacy if he so decides to sign Censorship into law in 2023:

‘Certainly the removal of the order had an effect on the Northern Ireland talks. Much more importantly, the people’s right to exercise their own discrection and judgement had been partially vindicated. The removal of self-censorship would be a longer journey. For me, the removal of the order and the establishment of Teilifis na Gaeilge are probably the two issues that constituted what one might call bottom line issues. Both issues pertained to the notion of the public sphere and a civic culture in which all shades of opinion — representing dominant groups and minority groups as well, as official, alternative and oppositional voices — might be represented.’³⁷

As much as a rallying call for Freedom of Speech as these words are, it is also important to recognise those nameless heroes who pressured Higgins into making the right decision. Higgins reports that ‘during that year that followed I consulted with many groups but by now was dealing with impatience of some of those who shared my views as to the abolition of the order’.

He writes that protesters against Section 31 censorship crowded a poetry reading of his in Cork, sent an endless stream of letters to him and even convinced his own publisher to put pressure on him in Galway.³⁸ Undoubtedly, Higgins was faced with exactly what he asked for — active, democratic citizenship.

Similarly, by the late 1980s into the 90s, there was a broad alliance of disparate Free Speech lobbying groups and fronts organised to put pressure on the Censorship regime. One such organisation was Article 19, an international Free Speech organisation which distributed the book ‘NO COMMENT: Censorship, Secrecy and the Irish Troubles’ in 1989. They report the broad coalescence of Free Speech organisations during the era, which ultimately helped defeat censorship:

‘Several organisations have decided, or been created, to combat censorship and to promote freedom of information in relation to Northern Ireland. The media unions, civil liberties groups, the Campaign for Free Speech on Ireland, Information on Ireland, the Committee on the Administration of Justice, the Repeal Section 31 Committee, Media Watch, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF) have all campaigned on Irish information rights in recent years.’

The importance in remembering groups like these is in the lesson of battling a juggernaut like censorship. According to Higgins neoliberalism, which all Western censorship regimes practice, emanates from ‘some systemic corruption sourced in the networks of a small, well-connected elite at the top of certain speculative sectors of the economy and banking system’ as well as ‘an inflexible, ritualistic bureaucracy at the bottom at another level’ —perhaps the greatest description of the NGO censorship complex one could give.³⁹

In order to defeat such a power structure, surely an alternative network of Free Speech organisations and advocacy groups is the way forward for battling Censorship.

Can freedom of expression in Ireland be saved once again?

As we enter into a new era of assault on Free Speech in Ireland, the question must be asked: what can we take from the battle against Section 31? Are we going to have to wait through 30 years of censorship to see it repealed? — or will the Gaels peacefully fight back, ushering in a new century of Gaelic saints and scholars, unafraid of carrying the burden of Western intellect as Europe re-enters the Dark ages?

1. Section 10, Offence of preparing or possessing material, p.11.

2. Section 15, Search warrants, p.13-14.

3. Section 9, Provisions relating, p.10.

4. White, Alex. ‘Section 31: ministerial orders and court challenges’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.37.

5. Ibid, p.36.

6. Ibid.

7. Fisher, Desmond. ‘Getting tough with RTÉ’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.66.

8. Ibid, p.68.

9. Ferriter, Diarmaid. The Transformation of Ireland, 2004, p.654.

10. Coogan, Tim Pat. The IRA, 1993, p.320.

11. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1975-03-12/4/

12. O’Brien, Mark. ‘Disavowing Democracy’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.49.

13. Coogan, Tim Pat, The I.R.A., 2000, p.421–422.

14. Coogan, Tim Pat. The Troubles, 2002, p.382.

15. Ibid, p.383.

16. Coogan, Tim Pat. The IRA, 1993, p.323.

17. O’Brien, Mark. ‘Disavowing Democracy’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.52.

18. Coogan, Tim Pat. The IRA, 1993, p.321.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid, p.53.

21. Ibid.

22. Cruise O'Brien, Conor. Memoir: My Life and Themes, 1999, p.355.

23. https://theneumannforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Foreign-Direct-Investment-Liberal-Economic-Development-and-the-Proliferation-of-Socio-Political-Pathology-final1.pdf

24. Mullan, Don. The Dublin and Monaghan bombings. Wolfhound Press, 2000, p.133–134.

25. https://magill.ie/archive/secret-world-sfwp-part-2

26. Hanley, Brian & Scott Millar. The Lost Revolution, 2009, p.429.

27. Ibid, p.430.

28. Ibid, p.531.

29. Ibid, p.532.

30. Corcoran, Mary P.. ‘A deceived audience or a discerning audience?’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.129.

31. Browne, Vincent. ‘The Cardinal: essentially right on the media’ in Sunday Tribune, 7 June 1992.

32. Corcoran, Mary P.. ‘A deceived audience or a discerning audience?’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.129.

33. Kenny, Colum. ‘Censorship, not “self-censorship”’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.78.

34. Ibid.

35. Moloney, Ed. ‘Censorship and The Troubles’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.104.

36. Higgins, Michael D. ‘Culture, democracy and public service broadcasting’ in Political Censorship, 2005, p.139.

37. Ibid, p.143.

38. Ibid, p.141.

39. Higgins, Michael D. ‘The Role of the Public Representative’ in Renewing the Republic, 2011, p.155.