Researching Censorship

By AM Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Niall Meehan, head of the Journalism & Media Faculty, Griffith College, Dublin, is said to be researching censorship in Ireland. This is a worthy exercise and I am hardly alone in looking forward to the finished product. Of all the obituaries penned for the grand censor Conor Cruise O’Brien, Meehan more than most provided a very robust account of the life of the late writer. He stripped away the layers of liberalism that Cruise O’Brien had become swathed in and depicted a figure much more draconian than the short term political memory of obituarists would ever retain.

Elsewhere Meehan has been busy pursuing the historian Peter Hart. This pursuit is much less about censorship but a belief on the part of Meehan that Hart has been guilty of serious errors in his history constructions. In each case the overall point of Meehan’s concern is his professed objection to the truth being revised, filtered, refracted or simply suppressed. Whether through distortion or censorship, for Meehan the issue is ‘how Irish history was turned into propaganda.’

The challenge for Meehan is of course to avoid being led onto the blind spots that so often limit the vision of those flushing out the censor. It would be a disservice to his anti-censorship ethos if for any reason he were to succumb to the darkness, thereby failing to find that censorship is much more pervasive in Irish society than any probing of Conor Cruise O’Brien and his cohorts might reveal.

For both the neutral and hostile observer the interest will be on the degree to which Niall Meehan pursues all censors with the same vigour. It has already been alleged by one of his critics, a former student of his, that ‘Meehan's notes on censorship - his specialist subject - lacked balance.’ The neutral will be disappointed and the hostile delighted if he simply chases the censors that pollute his political space while dropping his vigilance when it comes to scrutinising practices closer to home. Given Niall Meehan’s iconoclast stance against Cruise O’Brien, his scepticism towards the work of Harte, and again the refrain from his former student that he is a ‘prolific letter writer on Sinn Fein-linked subjects’ there will hover a suspicion that his focus on censorship will confine itself to those who have made the journey of Sinn Fein a turbulent ride. There were certainly enough of them doing just that. And Meehan would be wholly justified in taking umbrage at the draconian policies practiced against the party.

Yet such a narrow focus would lift the lid on only some of the censorious policies and practices that have turned history into propaganda. There is enough evidence out there, easy to find with little effort, which would show how the poacher often turns game keeper. Sinn Fein, for example, has routinely practiced the censorship it ostensibly set its face against. Regrettably, suppression of alternative viewpoints is a key component of a more pervasive anti-intellectualism that has featured so strongly within republicanism in Ireland. Professor Tom Garvin once pointed out that republicans can end up being the most enthusiastic of censors. Garvin’s observation only stings on first hearing. A quick follow up usually suffices to confirm the validity of his charge.

If Niall Meehan’s goal is to research only some of the censorship that plagued Ireland there is nothing wrong with that although he should state that to be so. It is important that we know something about censorship rather than nothing. If, on the other hand, his goal is to take the censorious beast by both horns rather than only one, then it is inconceivable that the range of epistemological areas gored by the horns would not be investigated with equal rigour.

History is propaganda when it is falsified in the service of some political goal. How the question of Gerry Adams’ relationship to the IRA will be handled by Niall Meehan will be instructive in respect of this. There is a widespread view that this is an issue deliberately clouded by Sinn Fein for the purpose of allowing propaganda to trump history. Moreover, is there a single recorded case where any journalist or academic has stated that Adams has never been a member of the IRA? Whether he was or not is hardly the point. It is the manner in which Meehan’s research methodology approaches the issue that shall determine the seriousness with which his conclusions will be treated.

Another area that would prove most revealing for Niall Meehan’s research is one where the issues of truth distortion and censorship dovetailed perfectly when in 2003 Sinn Fein angrily accused the media of being involved in a securocrat plot to undermine the peace process when it revealed the identity of the senior British agent Stakeknife as one, Freddie Scappaticci. A former leading member of the Provisional IRA’s security department, Scappaticci had wreaked havoc within the ranks of the organisation for decades. His exposure was a serious embarrassment to the Sinn Fein leadership. There was indeed a concerted attack on the truth at the time in which some elements of the media to their shame were involved. In An Phoblacht/Republican News, for instance, one Dublin journalist writing under the nom de guerre Adam O’Toole battled valiantly but vainly to stop readers reaching an honest conclusion.

There are many people out there who wish Niall Meehan well in his endeavour. They would not want to see him stumble in his quest to expose all the censorious elements within Irish society. Many of them were targets for the censors. They will assist him in identifying both the practices and the practitioners. They will even inform him of the real identity of Adam O’Toole.