Customer Reviews

CENSORSHIP IRELAND 1939-45 (hb) (Irish history)

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When you get about half way through this book, you realise one of it's problems: the author tells us that irealnd was such a small, poor country at the time that none of it's papers had any foreign correspondents. This makes us wonder if a book-lenght study of censorship in the country at the time is really necessacary. It is a worthy enough addition to teh growing volume of literature on "the Emergency" though we are left to wonder if it was really worth giving an individual sub-chapter to the irish governments relations with EACH nation newspaper of the era. It's got it's moments of amusement, like when a picture of kids feeding animals in london zoo is censored because it might envoke sympathy for one of the antagonists in the conflict, and some fascinating characters, like Frank Aiken, the minister responsible for the censorship, and Bertie Smylie, then editor of the Irish Times. It's tone, however, is generally academic and it appears to be aimed primarily at specialists.