This chapter reflects on the implications of censorship for writers working after 1940, first, by questioning the extent to which its imposition hampered the expression of a modern literary generation, and second, by exploring the strategies through which it was sidestepped and transgressed by both writers and readers in this period. It considers both the cultural implications of domestic censorship for Irish writers between 1940 and 1980, and the means that existed for circumventing the policing of ‘foreign’ literature. It highlights the pervasive effects of censorship across the middle decades of the century. First, the focus is on Kate O’Brien, Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, all born before independence, who found themselves directly at odds with the country they had seen created. Faced with the banning of their own books, they battled to resist official strictures of their work. It then considers a subsequent generation of writers – including Edna O’Brien, Leland Bardwell, John Montague, John McGahern and Julia O’Faoláin – born during a period in which censorship had already become embedded within Irish literary culture. Finally, this chapter concludes by examining the experience of Colm Tóibín, who grew up in the 1950s, when censorship was still a dominant force.

Seán O’Faoláin is the embodiment in twentieth-century Irish cultural life of a version of the European public intellectual. A commentator on Irish and world affairs, he responded frequently to the political directives of the mid-century decades, pushing against the pressures towards insularity and clerical nationalism and recruiting literary culture to his cause. Co-founder of the influential journal The Bell, he was also a journalist and essayist, the author of fiction, several major biographies, travel writer and literary critic. Across this eclectic oeuvre O’Faoláin advanced his sense of a world in which the writer worked to maintain connections with English and Continental culture, claiming for Ireland a European position. In the 1940s his voice was perhaps at its most impressive and diverse, culminating in the publication in 1947 of The Irish: A Character Study, his vibrant diagnosis of the emerging nation. This chapter reassesses O’Faoláin’s role as a European public intellectual in a time of global crisis, drawing new comparisons between O’Faoláin and a diverse array of contemporary commentators including Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt.

This chapter reconsiders the cultural condition of 1940s Ireland in the context of wartime neutrality, exploring the literary response to the hostilities in Ireland itself, north and south, and the complex positioning of the writers involved who treated its effects on a domestic landscape, including Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Benedict Kiely. How did Irish writers respond to the aftermath of the Second World War and, in particular, the filtering of information about the Holocaust? The Irish author and playwright Denis Johnston, a BBC correspondent in the Middle East for much of the conflict, represents one of those with direct experience of the action and its diplomatic fallout. This chapter challenges a historical acceptance that Ireland became increasingly insular and detached as a result of its wartime political neutrality, and identifies instead a set of important literary engagements driven by the wider horizon of the conflict.