Before I start my speech proper, I should like to pay a compliment to the remarks made by Senator Alexis FitzGerald which I and other Senators have had an opportunity of reading in the Official Report. We are all in the Senator's debt for what he has said on this subject and for his breadth of vision and the wide scope with which he has treated it. I should like to take the Senator up on one particular point. The Senator wondered why persons "to the left" did not expend more energy on condemning and criticising the kind of exploitation we know as pornography. If I may align myself on that very lonely promontory with other persons "on the left" I should like to say to the Senator and to other Members of the House that there are people who believe in these kind of ideas who do, in fact, protest against the kind of exploitation of people that pornography involves but they do not, like so many other people, make protest against pornography a substitute for protest against other forms of exploitation. There is a kind of trait in the human character which encourages some kinds of people to jump on band wagons about things like pornography and drug addiction and abuse. I am not saying these are not serious problems they are, and they will continue to be the concern of people who want to see society a better and healthier place for all the people to live in but I am very suspicious of, and to some extent depressed, by the activities of people who confine their protest to things like this and who, it seems to us, merely jump on band wagons when they arrive and do not see that there are other different, and very much worse forms of exploitation than pornography which are not dealt with at the same level and with the same intensity simply because the issues just do not happen to be as clearcut. I do not think Senator Alexis FitzGerald's implied criticism is altogether accurate. I suggest that people, who for a wide variety of reasons and for very often not praiseworthy reasons, attack pornography should also examine their consciences about the exploitation that takes place in other areas.
I should like to comment on Senator Keery's remarks. The Senator made an important point when he referred to the fact that one of the real problems facing the censor is not immorality in terms of sexual immorality, but immorality in respect of violence on our screens. I must agree with the Senator when he said that it is not absolutely proven that violence on the screen is a direct cause of violence in society. This brings me to a position where I can link the speeches of Senator Alexis FitzGerald and that of Senator Keery to the effect that if violence on the screen helps to produce violence in society it is only because it is working on ground which has already been made fertile by very inadequate social conditions and by social disabilities of a kind which produce a socially-deprived population, linguistically, educationally and otherwise. People who condemn violence on films and the glorification of violence must extend their condemnation to the kind of social conditions which breed people on whom violent films can have a disastrous effect.
Senator Keery refers specifically to the effect of film violence on Irish people in general. The Senator went on to make some point about the fact that our admissions to mental hospitals are among the highest in the world. This may be so. I take it it is so. We should, however, beware of using statistics in this kind of way. If it is true that we have the highest proportion of admissions to mental hospitals of any nation in the world, that statement must be qualified by mentioning two other facts. Our population structure is such that we have a relatively high proportion of old people. Our attitude to old people is frequently exemplified by the way in which we are all too ready to put old people into mental institutions on one pretext or another which has very little to do with their mental health and a great deal to do with general social attitudes towards them. The fact that this is so, and that the age structure of our population is such, is due to the continuous haemorrhage of emigration. Those are the kind of wishes that should be used to qualify the Senator's intention.
So far in this debate we have been listening to talk about censorship and the way in which it is exercised, but this has been dealt with in such a way as to make it a case of a Hamlet without a prince, because one cannot talk about censorship without talking also about the censor. In saying this I am not making any reference to the particular individual who is responsible for censoring films here. Rather, I have in mind the kind of criteria adopted by the Government in appointing a censor.
For far too long in this country the office of censor of films has been regarded as an appointment that is overwhelmingly political in its character— an appointment that is made with only the very slightest attention to the kind of work that the censor is supposed to do. I am not casting any personal aspersions on the present or on any previous censor but it must be acknowledged that for too long this position has been regarded as one where a person is put out to grass as it were. This aspect is very relevant to the Bill under consideration.
The censor should be a man who knows a great deal about films. He should be able to defend any decisions he may make. If all censors were appointed in this spirit it would not be necessary so often to have to bring in the kind of legislation with which we are dealing here.
Senator Keery spoke also on this Bill and made a very good point when he said there is no list published on films that are kept out of the country by the censor. I would agree with him that this is a shortcoming which should be remedied. But this practice also prevents people from knowing what has been cut from individual films. I am not quite sure why this should be so. One of the reasons may be that the people in the industry must keep on the right side of the censor. Some system of publication (a) of films rejected and (b) of cuts made in films passed should be made available to the public.
In general terms it is important to consider not only the nature but the origin of the motivation behind censorship in this country. I believe that nine-tenths of all censorship is motivated by a mixture of fear, laziness and hypocrisy. When we remember the history of censorship here we can distinguish two main strands. The first is the nationalist and revolutionary strand. This strand can be seen principally in the unwillingness of any country in an immediate post-revolutionary situation to allow anything to be screened that might appear to reflect on the values of that revolution and on the people who helped to make it. This is a phenomenon that is common in other countries besides Ireland. For instance, it is common in the Soviet Union, where it has been carried on to a ridiculous extent. The situation there is that nobody is allowed to make any films that do not in some way reflect a so-called "socialist realism."
On the one hand, one can understand this kind of attitude, but it need not be linked to the kind of Philistinism that seems to be attached to it elsewhere. I am thinking in particular of the very fine film made recently in Cuba called Memories of Underdevelopment. This film was unique in that it was made in a post-revolutionary situation and, at the same time, gave a very sympathetic picture of the kind of people against whom the revolution had been directed.
That strand of motivation does not now seem to be the dominant strand of the motivation of censorship in this country. Perhaps, the dominant strand now is one of a peculiar kind of moral conservatism that we seem to have got as part of our bargain for Catholic emancipation. When the majority of the inhabitants of this country were emancipated in religious terms they seemed to think that the best way in which they could show gratitude for their emancipation was to adopt the prevailing moral attitudes of the country which emancipated them. I say attitudes and not practices advisedly because we all know that the attitudes and practices of Victorian England both in terms of sexual and of commercial morality were widely divergent. This particular strand is operative in our censorship system at the moment.
On this aspect I should like to refer briefly to an interesting judgment given in the United States Supreme Court in 1952. In that year the Supreme Court held that the first amendment to the American Constitution protecting freedom of speech protected also motion pictures. The court pointed out in this regard, and I quote that:
.... the censor is set adrift upon a boundless sea amid a myriad of conflicting currents of religious views, with no charts but those provided by the most vocal and powerful orthodoxies....
I think it fair to say that in the Irish situation today these vocal and powerful orthodoxies are the ones that frame our approach to censorship. I believe these orthodoxies to be those of moral and political conservatism. They operate in such a way as to restrict the freedom of some of the minorities in this country. Indeed, I would suggest that they restrict the freedom not only of some of the minorities but also of the majority. It may come as a surprise to the House to learn that at least half of the population in this country are less than 28 years of age and that 47 per cent are less than 25 years of age so that we have a situation in which the minority is legislating for the majority.
We should be aware that as we debate this Bill, we are, to some extent, witnessing the swansong of censorship generally. Within a few years the sheer availability of images, of speech, and of the mass media generally will make the kind of censorship that we are discussing utterly irrelevant. With that reminder I support the Bill in so far as it goes.