Skip to content

cearta.ie

the Irish for rights

Menu
  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Contact
  • Research

Category: Censorship

Is Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscene?

21 July, 20092 November, 2017
| 8 Comments
| Censorship, criminal libel, Freedom of Expression, Law, Obscenity

Cover of first Penguin edition of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' via the Bristol University siteNo, at least so far as the law is concerned. But after its initial publication in 1928, it was not until the 1960s that litigation in the US and the UK allowed it to become generally available. An op-ed by Fred Kaplan in the today’s New York Times, entitled The Day Obscenity Became Art, (with added links) tells us that

today is the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that overturned America’s obscenity laws, setting off an explosion of free speech — … The historic case began on May 15, 1959, when Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, sued the Post Office for confiscating copies of the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which had long been banned for its graphic sex scenes.

… Mr. Rosset hired a lawyer named Charles Rembar, … [who] presented “Lady Chatterley” as a novel of ideas that inveighed against sex without love, the mechanization of industrial life and morbid hypocrisy. … On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail.

…

Read More »

Cowengate caricatures “didn’t bother” Cowen: why the fuss?

6 June, 200920 January, 2013
| No Comments
| Blogging, Censorship, Freedom of Expression, Irish Society, Sedition

Hot Press cover, via their siteOn the top right hand corner of a cover of Hot Press (pictured left) runs a quote from the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Brian Cowen:

Those paintings didn’t bother me

It is a teaser for a full interview with Jason O’Toole in which Cowen talks about the current economic crisis and his party’s electoral prospects. This is what he said about those paintings:

Do you read any of the political blogs written about you and your government?
No, I don’t. I’ve been too busy trying to do my job.

Do you think the recent controversy over the painting was blown out of proportion?
I made no comment about it at the time. As far as I was concerned, it was obviously a stunt. I know some people thought it wasn’t in great taste, but I just stayed out of it. I have a thick enough political skin at this stage – formed over the 25 years I’ve been in this business – not to be bothered by something like that.

So, just what was all the fuss about?…

Read More »

Why protect free speech?

11 May, 200919 May, 2009
| 6 Comments
| Censorship, Freedom of Expression

Index on Censorship has published a short edited extract from Ideas That Matter: Key Concepts for the 21st Century (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) by AC Grayling, Professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, in which he provides a compelling and pithy case in favour of free speech and against censorship:

It’s a surprise to learn how universal censorship is

Cover of Grayling's While even the most tyrannical regime will pay lip service to free speech, it is a right that is constantly denied.

There are two bedrock civil liberties without which the very idea of civil liberty is empty. They are freedom of speech and due process of law. … The fundamental justifications for freedom of expression are as follows. First, it is an intrinsic right of every individual not to be forced to think, speak and believe at the dictate of others, but to do these things of their own free accord. Secondly, it is of the essence to the possession and protection of other liberties that individuals have this right. Thirdly, in the absence of the first two considerations, the full development of the human individual is vastly more difficult and in most cases not even possible, Fourthly, freedom of expression is essential to the interchange of ideas and views, and discussion of them, without which society cannot be healthy or mature.

…

Read More »

Cowengate: no use crying over spilt milk

21 April, 20096 August, 2009
| 6 Comments
| Blogging, Censorship, ECHR, Freedom of Expression, Irish Society, Sedition
'Silvio Berlusconi and Mara Carfagna, via New York Times
Silvio Berlusconi and Mara Carfagna, though not by Filippo Panseca

Yesterday’s Times Online has a short piece which begins [with added links]

A scarf is the only thing protecting the modesty of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, in a painting of him and his Minister for Equal Opportunities, Mara Carfagna, 32, a former topless model, as angels. The work by Filippo Panseca is in a show at Savona on the Italian Riviera. Mr Panseca, 69, said that he wanted to pay tribute to the Prime Minister, 72, in the exhibition, which also includes a painting in similar style of Mr Berlusconi’s wife Veronica Lario.

The same story is also covered in The Independent, The Telegraph, and The Daily Mail. The inevitable comparisons with Cowengate were drawn by the Evening Herald, which adds that Panseca said that if

Berlusconi bought the paintings he would donate the money to the earthquake victims of Abruzzo. Mr Berlusconi has yet to comment. But he seems unlikely to buy the pictures: last year, he censored a bare nipple in a copy of a renaissance painting hung in the government press room.

More seriously, though, it seems that 144 people complained to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission about RTÉ’s coverage, 9 about the original report, and 135 about the apology; and Suzy has posted a copy of RTÉs response to the BCC regarding those complaints.…

Read More »

Cowengate follow-on: a question, and more pictures at the exhibitions

29 March, 20092 April, 2009
| 16 Comments
| Blogging, Censorship, Defamation, Freedom of Expression, Irish Law, Irish Society, journalism, Law, Sedition
Emerson, Lake and Palmer performing their 1971 album version of Pictures at an Exhibition

The Cowengate controversy certainly caught the imagination this week; and, by way of update to my earlier posts on the topic, I’ve collected some more links about the affair below. Perusing the coverage in print, broadcast, and online, a question has repeatedly occurred to me: for all that there was online outrage, how much of it was reflected in the print or broadcast media? My impression is that whilst online commentary reflected and often relied upon the print or broadcast media, there was (by and large) very little traffic the other way. Is this a fair assessment? Answers, please, in the comments below.

[The remainder of the post is another compendium of links relating to the Cowengate controversy].…

Read More »

Cowengate and Freedom of Expression

26 March, 200914 September, 2020
| 37 Comments
| Blogging, Censorship, Defamation, Freedom of Expression, Irish Law, Irish Society, Journalists' sources, Sedition
No image, to represent the attempt to censor the Cowen caricatures

Suzy must get the prize for popularising the best political coinage of the day, for – so far as I can see – it is she who has run with the name “Cowengate” for the sturm und drang surrounding satirical portraits of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Brian Cowen. In a piece of guerrilla artistry as ingenious as the coinage Suzy has popularised, caricatures of Mr Cowen were anonymously hung on the walls of the National Gallery of Ireland and the Royal Hibernian Academy. Once they were discovered, they were removed, but not before they had garnered sufficient publicity for RTÉ (Raidio Telefís Éireann, the national state broadcaster) to broadcast a story about them on the flagship 9:00pm television news programme.

It has been the occasion for lots of bad puns and some embarrassment on the part of the Taoiseach, the Gallery and the Academy, but in the ordinary course of things, the story should have blown over after about 48hours. However, things then took two turns for the worse. First, RTÉ apologised to Mr Cowen and his family or for any disrespect shown to the office of Taoiseach by their broadcast.…

Read More »

Cowengate: Pictures at an exhibition

26 March, 20092 April, 2009
| 29 Comments
| Blogging, Censorship, Defamation, Freedom of Expression, Irish Law, Irish Society, Journalists' sources, Law, Sedition
Ravel‘s orchestration of Mussorgksy‘s Pictures at an Exhibition, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen at the BBC Proms in August 2006

This post is an addendum to Cowengate and Freedom of Expression (above). In the original version of that post, I had a paragraph of links to other coverage. Like Topsy, that paragraph growed and growed, so I’ve taken the list of links out of that post and put them here.…

Read More »

The power of letters

24 February, 2009
| 1 Comment
| Censorship, Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, data retention, Human Rights

Front page of today's Guardian, via the Guardian's siteShami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties), has an editorial letter published in today’s Guardian which begins:

Sir – 75 years ago today, in a Britain strained by economic crisis and social unrest, and in the long shadow of international conflict, the birth of the National Council for Civil Liberties was announced in a letter to this newspaper.

Little has changed. As is reported elsewhere in the same edition, students from the University College London Student Human Rights Programme, have prepared a report setting out the current assaults on liberty in the UK, under the suitably Orwellian title of The Abolition of Freedom Act 2009. It was prepared for this weekend’s forthcoming Convention on Modern Liberty (organised by the UK’s leading human rights campaigners, including Liberty and the Guardian) and it makes for chilling reading.

The situation is equally as grim in Ireland. Today’s Irish Times carries an article by Elaine Byrne on a forthcoming report prepared by her for Transparency International on serious shortcomings which have weakened the quality of Ireland’s democracy. The same edition carries an article on the financial costs associated with the forthcoming data retention regime being challenged by Digitial Rights Ireland.…

Read More »

Posts pagination

Previous 1 … 4 5 6 … 8 Next

Welcome

Me in a hat

Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


Academic links
Academia.edu
ORCID
SSRN
TARA

Subscribe

  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Recent posts

  • A trillion here, a quadrillion there …
  • A New Look at vouchers in liquidations
  • Defamation reform – one step backward, one step forward, and a mis-step
  • As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted … the Defamation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 has been restored to the Order Paper
  • Defamation in the Programme for Government – Updates
  • Properly distributing the burden of a debt, and the actual and presumed intentions of the parties: non-theories, theories and meta-theories of subrogation
  • Open Justice and the GDPR: GDPRubbish, the Courts Service, and the Defence Forces

Archives by month

Categories by topic

Licence

Creative Commons License

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. I am happy for you to reuse and adapt my content, provided that you attribute it to me, and do not use it commercially. Thanks. Eoin

Credit where it’s due

Some of those whose technical advice and help have proven invaluable in keeping this show on the road include Dermot Frost, Karlin Lillington, Daithí Mac Síthigh, and
Antoin Ó Lachtnáin. I’m grateful to them; please don’t blame them :)

Thanks to Blacknight for hosting.

Feeds and Admin

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

© cearta.ie 2025. Powered by WordPress