Kevin Rockett, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Book Review‪)‬

Kevin Rockett, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. 496 pages. No price given. Issues related to post-independence film censorship and censorship of publications in Ireland have constituted a popular part of both scholarly and public debate for some time. It may therefore seem surprising that the amount of literature devoted to the subject to date is not vast. The respective, and often intertwined, histories of film censorship and censorship of publications have only been treated partly by authors in the past, the only exception being Michael Adams's still unsurpassed study, Censorship: The Irish Experience (1967). (Among the shorter publications and the ones focusing on a certain area of Irish censorship are Julia Carlson's book of interviews, Banned in Ireland: Censorship & the Irish Writer (1990), and Donal O Drisceoil's Censorship in Ireland, 1939-1945: Neutrality, Politics and Society (1996); the latter devotes a chapter to film and also marginally deals with books).