{"id":567499,"date":"2026-07-25T12:20:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T12:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/567499\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T12:20:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T12:20:14","slug":"pure-filth-irelands-banned-films-and-why-the-censor-didnt-want-you-to-see-them-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/567499\/","title":{"rendered":"Pure filth! Ireland\u2019s banned films \u2013 and why the censor didn\u2019t want you to see them \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A generation of Irish cinemagoers has grown up with no memory of the bad old days when theocratic censors kept comically unthreatening material from the nation\u2019s supposedly fragile eyes. <\/p>\n

Films banned included such unmitigated filth as Casablanca, Brief Encounter and Mildred Pierce. When supposedly risqu\u00e9 films did make it through, they were often so mangled as to make little sense.<\/p>\n

John Kelleher, who took over as censor in 2003<\/a>, came into the office with weary memories of what had been kept from the keen cineaste.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a young adult in the 1970s, in my 20s and early 30s,\u201d he tells me. \u201cThat\u2019s your prime cinemagoing age, and 200 movies were then banned in Ireland. It\u2019s outrageous. <\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, working in the business, I was pretty familiar with the background, and I was always very interested in it. That\u2019s why I applied. I thought there was more to be done in terms of modernising the outfit.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Ireland used to ban films. Now it\u2019s more relaxed than Britain or the US about what\u2019s on screen. Why?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Keheller, a famously genial man with a distinguished CV as producer and executive, played a significant part in bringing that grim era to an end. In 2008 he changed the name of the Irish Film Censor\u2019s Office to the Irish Film Classification Office, reflecting a change in emphasis from prohibition to clarification. By the time his tenure came to an end, in 2009, the banning of films was, essentially, a thing of the past.<\/p>\n

After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was much foolish chatter about \u201cthe end of history\u201d. That didn\u2019t quite work out. But the words might reasonably, in this limited field, be applied to what Kelleher accomplished in the early years of the century.<\/p>\n

It was a watershed, he says. \u201cFor a whole variety of reasons. Change of name. Change of a lot of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelleher is, therefore, the ideal person to present and co-write a documentary about the often sorry history of film censorship in Ireland. In the Opinion of the Censor, co-produced by Oireachtas TV, takes us from the introduction of the Censorship of Films Act in 1923 through squabbles over Mae West\u2019s double entendres on to Elvis\u2019s dangerous torso and up to the last throes with a ban on Natural Born Killers in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

\"MaeMae West with Cary Grant in
\nI\u2019m No Angel (1933). Photograph: Paramount Pictures <\/p>\n

There is a lot in Andrew Gallimore and Lydia Monin\u2019s film, which screens on RT\u00c9 next week, that might surprise the casual observer. The Catholic Church<\/a> is, it hardly needs to be said, a large part of the story, but it seems there was cross-faith support for the introduction of the legislation. One also gets little sense of public disquiet for the first few decades of the regime.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at the history of it, it is possible to be angry,\u201d Kelleher say. \u201cIt\u2019s possible to be amused. It\u2019s possible to be astonished. All sorts of different emotions and experiences, because it was just so bizarre in some respects. And yet it reflected the times we were in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelleher points towards the title of the film. The words \u201cin the opinion of the censor\u201d were included in the legislation. There was a real sense that one man (it was always a man) would be the controlling force, and subsequent decisions reflected the sensibility of the office holder.<\/p>\n

That man had a lot to ponder about sex, violence and religion. Kelleher notes that Dr Martin Brennan, who served as censor from 1954 until 1956, cut a scene from Elia Kazan\u2019s On the Waterfront because a priest, played by Karl Malden, dared to have a drink in a pub. <\/p>\n

A sequence from Gone With the Wind that saw Vivien Leigh daring to lower the shoulders of her dress was too much for James Montgomery, who served from the office\u2019s creation, in 1923, until 1939.<\/p>\n

Dr Kevin Rockett, author of the definitive doorstop Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography, has argued, according to Kelleher, \u201cthat screen censorship reflects the cultural and social history of a society\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"InIn the Opinion of the Censor: John Kelleher, Ireland’s final film censor. Photograph: Daniel Geesen\/RT\u00c9 <\/p>\n

If this is true \u2013 and it almost certainly is \u2013 then In the Opinion of the Censor speaks to a pervading stasis in Irish society through the opening decades of independence. One also gets a sense of disrespect from authority to populace.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is this extraordinary idea that uneducated people couldn\u2019t make up their own minds,\u201d Prof Ruth Barton of Trinity College Dublin says in the film. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to think it would have been quite different for the middle classes. They wanted to see films imported from, say, France, but particularly the really, really influential films that were being made in the then Soviet Union.\u201d<\/p>\n

No chance of that.<\/p>\n

\u201cChurch and State said, \u2018Uh-uh, this is Bolshevik propaganda.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the beginning, Montgomery took the view that all films need to be released with general certificates,\u201d Rockett adds. \u201cTherefore, the youngest child could view every film. In that way, Montgomery, in common with many of the people in government in the first decades of the Irish Free State, treated the Irish people as if they were children.\u201d<\/p>\n

All very depressing. But most audiences will find themselves laughing as much as sighing during the documentary. Casablanca was initially banned because it was viewed as incompatible with Ireland\u2019s neutrality during the second World War. <\/p>\n

\"DooleyDooley Wilson sits at the piano while Humphrey Bogart pours Ingrid Bergman a drink in a scene from the film ‘Casablanca’, 1942. (Photo by Warner Brothers\/Getty Images) <\/p>\n

When it was resubmitted, following the German surrender, Richard Hayes, the second censor, allowed it in, but cuts were imposed to conceal the nature of Rick Blaine\u2019s (technically adulterous) affair with Ilsa Lundt in Paris two years before the main action of the film. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll always have Paris,\u201d Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, famously consoled. \u201cThe Irish cinema audience?\u201d Kelleher jokes in the doc. \u201cWell, they didn\u2019t have Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n

More absurd still was the banning of David Lean\u2019s Brief Encounter, in 1945. True, the film hinges on a potential (surely unconsummated) adulterous affair, but it is famous for the restraint and civility of its suburban emotions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was going back to the idea of a British thing we do not want,\u201d Kelleher tells me. \u201cWe do not want divorce. We do not want that. Brief Encounter is about a relationship between married people. Abortion? Contraception? Those things are not for Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, at least one contributor to the documentary argues that much of the censorship stemmed from resistance to the supposedly corrupting influence of perfidious Albion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was very, very strong I think,\u201d Kelleher says. \u201cBut it was articulated very eloquently by James Montgomery. He made that remark: \u2018It\u2019s not the anglicisation of Ireland I\u2019m so concerned about. It\u2019s the Los Angelisation.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Change was a long time coming, but there were brave voices resisting the conservative status quo. In the Opinion of the Censor finds space for the veteran (we might now risk \u201clegendary\u201d) arts journalist Ciaran Carty. <\/p>\n

In the 1960s, then with the Sunday Independent, he began comparing the running times of films on UK release and Irish release. What had happened to all those missing minutes? The documentary notes that the eventual author of Confessions of a Sewer Rat: A Personal History of Censorship and the Irish Cinema found himself \u201crummaging around in the bins to find the evidence\u201d.<\/p>\n

The censor at the time was, oddly, one of several medical doctors to occupy the post.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe censor, Christopher Macken, I looked into him and I discovered that he had no experience whatsoever,\u201d Carty says in the doc. \u201cExcept, for one week, he\u2019d been on the set of a film that was being made here. And Susan Hayward was having some trouble with her posterior riding a horse, and he had to come and give her injections. That was his qualification.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all Carty\u2019s efforts, the 1960s did not swing vigorously enough to change minds in the censor\u2019s office. The arrival to the job of Frank Hall, best known for the satirical TV show Hall\u2019s Pictorial Weekly, persuaded some that a sea change was afoot, but the broadcaster had other ideas. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was quite a good satirist,\u201d Carty says. \u201cBut he became censor, and the satire was suddenly an evil thing, Because he certainly wasn\u2019t reluctant to cut and ban.\u201d It was under his regime that Monty Python\u2019s Life of Brian was banned. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0An awful dump: The Ireland that banned Monty Python\u2019s Life of BrianOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

A true shift in thinking began with Sheamus Smith\u2019s arrival, in 1986 (though he still banned Oliver Stone\u2019s Natural Born Killers), and accelerated with Kelleher\u2019s appointment, in 2003. The theocratic meddling had no place in the modern, thrusting nation.<\/p>\n

\"WoodyWoody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers (1994). Photograph: Warner Bros <\/p>\n

I put it to Kelleher that a defining moment came, in 2004, when he appeared on The Late Late Show to defend the granting of a certificate to Michael Winterbottom\u2019s sexually explicit 9 Songs. <\/p>\n

Such items, in the Gay Byrne years, became fraught festivals of hand-wringing. But there was little such sense on that episode. After an objector in the audience (politely, it must be said) reads out a list of sexual acts portrayed, Pat Kenny jokes: \u201cYou may be in danger of advertising this film.\u201d The audience rocks with laughter. Few appear to be on the complainant\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re absolutely right,\u201d Kelleher says. \u201cIf you look at that clip there are two girls \u2013 young women \u2013 sitting behind him or in front of him; they\u2019re adjacent to him anyway. They\u2019re certainly not with him. The look? It\u2019s a mixture of incredulity and contempt and laughter and amusement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelleher, who worked on TV classics such as Strumpet City and spent time as managing director of the Sunday Tribune, is still the busiest of producers. Yet I wonder if he\u2019ll be best remembered for the few short years he spent consigning the censor\u2019s scythe to the rubbish bin.<\/p>\n

\u201cI won\u2019t be unhappy if that\u2019s the case, because I\u2019m proud of the things I managed to achieve,\u201d he says. \u201cNot just changing the name, but changing the whole ethos of the thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The end of (a little bit of) history.<\/p>\n

Five key films banned in IrelandCasablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)\"AA poster for Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Photograph: Movie Poster Image Art\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

Richard Hayes, the censor at the time, initially banned Casablanca because its apparent inclination towards the Allies infringed the Emergency Powers Order. \u201cPicture deals with North Africa. Shows German activities in sinister light, and Vichy partisans also. Unpresentable in a neutral country,\u201d the notes read. <\/p>\n

The picture was later passed but only with cuts to obscure the nature of Ilsa and Rick\u2019s adulterous affair. \u201cYou\u2019d think that cutting some of cinema\u2019s greatest lines would be something that Richard Hayes would regret,\u201d John Kelleher quips during In the Opinion of the Censor. \u201cMaybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ulysses (Joseph Strick, 1967)\"LeopoldLeopold Bloom actor Milo O’Shea in dream sequence with harem girls Maureen Toal, Clare Mullen and Pamela Mant. Filming Ulysses (1967) on location in Dublin in July 1966. Photograph: Daily Mirror\/Mirrorpix via Getty Images <\/p>\n

It is perhaps grimly appropriate that the first film adaptation of James Joyce\u2019s much-prosecuted novel was banned in his home country. The ban was upheld in 1974 and not lifted until 2000. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere were members of my own family who didn\u2019t care for the fact that I was an actress,\u201d Fionnula Flanagan, who had a striking role in the film, remembers. \u201cThey said they would pray for me. Yes, you know, all prayers are well received. Thank you. Yes, I\u2019ll take them all. They wouldn\u2019t watch the movie. It wasn\u2019t made available to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)\"Censored:Censored: Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. Photograph: United Artists\/Sunset Boulevard\/Corbis via Getty <\/p>\n

An interesting case. Dr Christopher Macken, the censor, initially banned this tale of shy Dustin Hoffman\u2019s seduction by the wryly sophisticated Anne Bancroft. No surprise there in contemporaneous Ireland. But the appeals board then reversed the decision. The catch? Eleven cuts that, in a mirror of the Casablanca case, rendered the core of the story unintelligible. <\/p>\n

\u201cIrish audiences were blissfully unaware of what was going on between Benjamin and Mrs Robinson,\u201d we hear during In the Opinion of the Censor. \u201cWe were as bewildered as Dustin Hoffman\u2019s character was bewildered by what was happening,\u201d the journalist Ciaran Carty echoes. <\/p>\n

Monty Python\u2019s Life of Brian (1979)\"GrahamGraham Chapman as Biggus Dickus in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979). HandMade Films <\/p>\n

To be fair, the Pythons\u2019 hilarious religious satire got in trouble almost everywhere. Eleven local councils banned it in Britain. \u201cSo funny it was banned in Norway!\u201d the Swedish posters read. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Ray Burke on how the books of almost every Irish writer of note were banned in the last centuryOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Sheamus Smith, then working as a producer, remembers challenging Frank Hall, the contemporaneous censor, about the ban. \u201cHe was almost fuming at the mouth, and his eyes were blazing,\u201d Smith says. \u201cSomething I\u2019d never seen before \u2013 and he was suggesting: who the hell was I to suggest that he shouldn\u2019t do what he had to do?\u201d <\/p>\n

Smith succeeded Hall and passed the film.<\/p>\n

Natural Born Killers (1995)<\/p>\n

Just as the Celtic Tiger was winding into action, Sheamus Smith surprised many by banning Oliver Stone\u2019s garish, comically violent satire about contemporary media. <\/p>\n

\u201cI felt it was gratuitous and unnecessary, and people were suggesting I didn\u2019t understand what that film was about,\u201d he says. \u201cI think I did, and I was the person in the job. I had the privilege, or the obligation or the responsibility, of doing what I thought was the right thing.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Irish Film Institute was, controversially, \u201crefused permission to show the film in an advertised extended run under its club rules\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the Opinion of the Censor is on RT\u00c9 One at 9.35pm on Monday, July 27th, and on RT\u00c9 Player<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A generation of Irish cinemagoers has grown up with no memory of the bad old days when theocratic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12780,93,114382,61,60,239455],"class_list":["post-567499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-catholic-church","tag-entertainment","tag-gay-byrne","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-irish-film-classification-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}