We say nothing out of a fear of being censured
YOU may have noticed there was not a murmur of complaint at the news this week that Justice Minister Helen McEntee intends quietly to shelve the Censorship of Publications Board. And as the week went on, that indifference became selfexplanatory. The idea of censoring books and magazines is beyond ludicrous when you consider – as we’ve seen in Dublin this week – that we have not an iota of control over the kind of stuff people can convince each other of online.
Ms McEntee’s planned repeal of the Censorship of Publications Act is belated if anything. The board itself has banned only one book (not worth mentioning) in the past 20 years. The minister acknowledges there’s no point banning books in the internet age, and I think we can all acknowledge there’s no point banning dirty magazines when 12-year-old kids are being given smartphones for their Confirmation and thereby hooked up with a direct line to Pornhub.
But don’t be fooled, the principle of censorship hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re just doing it differently these days.
In the information age, in the absence of old-fashioned State censorship, we’re doing a bang-up job of cultivating a new, experimental but highly effective censorship culture of our own.
Because it seems now that a minority of people are under the illusion that their ideas are being subjected to imaginary censorship – with dangerous effects. Meanwhile, the rest of us are submissively censoring ourselves.
THE rioters who vented their anti-immigrant rage on the streets of the capital on Thursday night believe the State, the ‘mainstream media’ and the ‘far left’ are colluding in concealing the ‘truth’ about immigration. I’m not sure what they think the truth is, or why they think we’re concealing it – but at any rate they think they’re being lied to.
Many of them are the same people who think the pandemic was a hoax and vaccines are a mass scientific experiment on the world’s population, and aircraft are leaving trails of poison in the skies and every Muslim you meet wants to impose Sharia law on you.
Nothing makes them madder than violent attacks by foreigners; they’d sooner have a decent Irish murder in a dispute over an acre of land any day. They’re whipped into a frenzy online, in a space where censorship cannot and does not apply, and yet they see censorship everywhere, and I’m afraid there’s no reaching them.
But as the best lies always contain a grain of truth, consider for a second the opprobrium you can bring on yourself if you so much as raise a polite question about one of these matters that’s subject to controversy.
Recall Independent TD Carol Nolan’s Dáil question last summer, a mere few months into the Ukraine war, when she asked what plans were in place to assess the numbers of refugees coming here, in view of the housing shortage. Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien made hay on it, accusing her of ‘posing a risk to social cohesion’. ‘We will take in as many Ukrainian citizens fleeing the brutal war foisted upon them through no fault of their own as we must,’ he said.
Quite. Let us keep taking in thousands, and thousands more, until we have literally nowhere left to put them, but let us not be called racist. Let them hole up in sodden, freezing tents, let them develop trenchfoot deep in the midlands, but let it not be said we are racist. Ms Nolan’s example is interesting because she seems to have got away with it. Others haven’t. Out of fear of condemnation or appearing to support the far right, or worse, being one of them, people are reluctant to open their mouths at all.
You can gleefully welcome the arrival of a multitude of vibrant different cultures and traditions to our historically homogeneous and parochial little island and you can thrill to the sight of once-desolate towns and villages now busy with life, thanks to immigration. And even while thinking that way, you can still hold the view that it’s just possible we might reach the point where we’re full. But you’d better not say so. Is it any wonder that people have taken the path of least resistance, and are censoring themselves?
IT’S not just the immigration question either. Think of the trouble that people have got into for stating certain self-evident scientific facts, such as that females have two X chromosomes and males have an X and a Y, and that sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth - the midwife can see at a glance which sex you are. When you can lose your livelihood for saying women don’t have a Y chromosome, it’s no wonder people stay silent. Easier to appear to go along with absolute drivel, than be called a bigot.
What about parents who willingly inoculated their children with all the tried and tested vaccines such as polio and diphtheria and MMR, but expressed even a moment’s slight hesitation about having them injected with the comparatively untested Covid vaccine? Crazed, mouthfoaming anti-vaxxers.
Elderly sick people who think they might just find the awful, frightening hospital experience a little bit easier if their doctor spoke English? Nasty xenophobes. Sabina Higgins proposing peace talks between Russia and Ukraine? Useful idiot, puppet of Putin. Any critic at all, no matter their eminence, of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza? Antisemite.
While official censorship may be done away with, the fear of censure has taken its place for the silent majority.
And in the absence of the antiseptic that is free speech, attitudes of the noisy minority grow ever more shrill, ever more sickening.
MARY CARR IS AWAY