COUNTY VIEW: The iron fist of the wartime censor

For anyone under the age of 50, if they think about it at all, Irish muteness in non-condemnation of the Nazi atrocities of World War II is a deep mystery. That a nation which prides itself on its compassion for the oppressed could tolerate, without public outcry, the policy of eradication of the Jewish race, flies in the face of all logic and reason.
And yet, the simple answer is equally incredible, because the reality was that the ordinary citizen knew absolutely nothing of the horrors being inflicted over those five years.
Today, we live in an age of instant news; social media guarantees that any event, anywhere in the world, becomes common knowledge within seconds. But such was not the case when heavy-handed censorship, vigilantly imposed from on high, ensured that not the slightest reference to wartime brutality would find its way to Irish readers or listeners.
Ireland’s stance of neutrality in the war was much trumpeted; we were above the conflict, and anything which might be remotely construed as either condoning or condemning the actions of either set of belligerents was to be avoided. And since, in the eyes of the Government, propaganda was an important weapon of war, we needed to be cautious about what information was allowed into the public domain, lest either of the warring factions might find an excuse for questioning our assertion of absolute neutrality.
Known as Emergency Censorship, the strictures applied to press and publications of every kind; films, radio and theatre; posters, telegraph and telephone communications. In the words of the responsible Minister, Frank Aiken, the purpose was to ‘keep the temperature down’, to suppress news or views which might threaten domestic stability, or encourage people to take a partisan stand. Thomas J Coyne, the senior civil servant in charge of censorship, opined that ‘the publication of atrocity stories, whether true or false, can do this country no good, and may do it much harm’.
The degree of censorship was nothing if not thorough. When the German legate in Dublin complained that an upcoming production in the Peacock Theatre of a play called ‘The Refugee’ would feature a Jewish refugee from an Austrian concentration camp, the producer was summoned by the Censor. A number of amendments to the script were suggested. When the play finally reached performance, the hero had simply become a refugee from Hungary, and all referenced to the concentration camp were left out completely. Special Branch detectives were in the first-night audience.
In truth, the government measures were quite acceptable to the general public. Such was the visceral Irish hatred of Britain – this was only two decades since the bloody War of Independence – that stories of atrocities were readily dismissed as Anglo propaganda. Even when, at war’s end, the true horror of concentration camps was revealed, many refused to believe what was uncovered in Dachau and Auschwitz. Some columnists even argued that the stories, in spite of eye witness and photographic evidence, were more British propaganda.
The non reporting of barbarity was applied across the board, even when the victims happened to be Irish Catholic. When the war in the Pacific saw the slaughter by the Japanese of 60 people, including Irish priests, in the De La Salle college in Manila, the suppressed press report blandly noted that ‘several people had died, having been congregated in Mandalay by orders of the Japanese’.
Four Maynooth Mission priests were forced into a house in Manila and were deliberately burned to death by the Japanese. The subsequent report in the Irish media noted the deaths ‘of four priests, during recent fighting in Manila’, implying that the deaths could have resulted from either US or Japanese military action.