Setting the Agenda for the Press: The 1929 Case Against the Waterford Standard

On October 29, 1929, the Dublin weekly Catholic newspaper the Standard proudly proclaimed that the first prosecution under the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929 had been successful in a cases tried in Waterford City.¹ The case brought against David C. Boyd, the editor of a provincial newspaper, the Waterford Standard, would influence the reporting of sexual crimes in the Irish Free State, and later, the Republic of Ireland, for decades to come. Despite its importance, the case has been largely overlooked in histories of censorship and Irish journalism, and even during the course of Boyd's prosecution the case received only limited coverage. The Irish press that had demonstrated a general compliance with censorship during the period of consultation prior to the bill and through its passage in the Dáil and Seanad. Much of the scholarly interest in this area has focused on the more visible impact of censorship on sections of the literary community, who—while often socially marginalized and small in number— highlighted their concerns during the debate of the censorship measure, and continued to push the boundaries after its passage.²

The 1929 legislation did more than develop the formal mechanism of censorship available to the government; it also bolstered deference and timidity in the Irish press. In the process, it embedded a risk-avoidant culture among Irish editors, at least in relation to matters held to be sensitive by Ireland's Catholic and political elite, leading to what Kieran Woodman has termed "censorship through anticipation."³ This censorship ensured an environment in which the realities of certain unpalatable aspects of Irish life were downplayed or simply ignored, in favor of reporting that supported propaganda, nationally and internationally, regarding the social and moral health of the Free State. The image portrayed by the press provided an essential element in the maintenance of the Free State's "national myth" of purity.⁴ Low levels of sexual immorality and of sexual crime came to be held up as key indicators of that supposed purity. Inconvenient truths in relation to both were as far as possible, kept away from national and international scrutiny.⁵ Furthermore, the religious and political elites of the Free State considered that reporting on sexuality and sexual crime was tantamount to a dangerous form of alien contamination that could adversely affect Ireland's less morally resolute sections of society—namely, the young, the working class, and the peasantry.

This ideologically driven agenda was to have a sustained impact on Ireland's developing democracy and the welfare of its people, including those children and adults who were to be sexually abused for decades to come. As Terence Brown has argued, this ideological position resulted in "Irish men and women, writers, artists, politicians, workers [committing] themselves to a vision of national destiny which often meant a turning away from much uncomfortable social reality to conceptions of the nation as a spiritual entity."⁶ The case against the Waterford Standard was to provide the object lesson in the consequences for any journalist whose reporting undermined the national myth.

David Boyd, the Belfast-born editor of the Waterford Standard, was a campaigning journalist with a strong sense of press freedom and social justice. Under Boyd's editorship, the Waterford Standard took a keen interest in social issues, including poverty, unemployment, child cruelty, and political corruption. Boyd was not afraid to take on vested interests, and by the time of the censorship case he was no stranger to defending his editorial decisions in the courts. He had won a case for criminal libel brought against him by the Local Appointments Board when he demanded candor regarding allegations of job fixing.⁷

Boyd's coverage of local controversies became even more strident after this court victory for which he won praise in Press and Printing, the official organ of the Associated Irish Newspaper and Irish Master Printers Association. The article casts some light on the journalistic community's prevailing sense, in the early Free State, that press freedom was being diminished—a sentiment that did not, by and large...