Is EOH anti trans rights, is that what she's implying? whats that got to do with her book being a paper version of Google?
Im not getting the link myself. It's kind of embarrassing that AGM is trying to discredit her review on the basis of "transphobia".
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Edit , I knew it was ringing a bell. I think AGM means this article talking about censorship post Roisin Murphy's "cancellation"....
John Charles McQuaid's Ireland is still alive and kicking.
Censorship never went away — all that's really changed is the rationale
Through her remarks on puberty blockers, singer Róisín Murphy put herself in the firing line of the secular heirs of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid
EILIS O'HANLON
Enoch Burke returned to Wilson's Hospital School last week to continue his lonely vigil in protest at being dismissed from his job for refusing to go along with gender neutral pronouns.
The facts of the case are well enough known at this stage. There's no need to rake over them again.
Interestingly, though, 60 years ago, another teacher was also in the news after being unceremoniously fired.
Copies of John McGahern's second novel, The Dark, which dealt with child abuse, had been seized by Customs and Excise officers, and the work was subsequently banned by the Censorship of Publications Board.
McGahern, who worked at the time as a teacher in what is now Belgrove Boys' National School in Clontarf, refused to take part in the protests which were organised on his book's behalf, and was only moved to take action when the school's principal said there would be some "difficulty” if he tried to return to his classroom.
McGahern decided "not to go quietly”. He describes in his 2005 book Memoir how he turned up at the school anyway. The embarrassed principal read out a legal letter informing the novelist that he was "barred from entering the classroom”. McGahern then spent the day in the staff room, refusing to leave, and drinking tea.
The teachers' union wouldn't intervene on his behalf; Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, the instigator of his firing, had got to them, too. When questions were raised in the Dáil, the education minister merely said: "When the church decides on a course of action, it generally has a good reason for that action.”
McGahern was not the only writer to suffer a similar fate. A few years earlier, Edna O'Brien's debut 1960 novel, The Country Girls, had been banned as "indecent and obscene”.
Five of her later novels were also prohibited, as well as scores of other books by Irish and non-Irish authors.
In hindsight, it's easy to see all this as "childish and unpleasant”, to borrow the words McGahern used to sum up his own thoughts on being banned.
Nowadays, we pride ourselves on being much more free, open-minded.
As the Taoiseach himself noted in a letter of support to librarians in Cork last month after protesters targeted books for young people they regarded as inappropriate: "Ireland was once a place of censorship when books and publications were banned because some did not agree with the concepts and ideas set out in them… It pains me to see that (this has) once again entered the public domain.”
In truth, censorship never really went away. All that changed was the rationale of the censors and the nature of the things they wished to ban.
The latest victim is Irish singer Róisín Murphy, whose record label has ceased all marketing and promotion of her new album days before its release after she made some remarks on a private Facebook page about her unhappiness with puberty blockers being prescribed to "little mixed-up kids” confused about their gender.
There's no need to go into the rights and wrongs of that debate either.
Suffice to say the list of countries which have banned or severely restricted the use of puberty blockers in recent years includes some which are regarded as the most socially progressive in the world and which are frequently held up as models for Ireland to follow, including Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark.
It could be that they're all wrong. It doesn't matter. The point is that it's hardly an extremist position to adopt.
And yet for saying what she said, Murphy has been attacked relentlessly, and her livelihood put under deliberate threat, even after issuing an abject apology pledging to "completely bow out of this conversation within the public domain”.
How is this any different, or better, than what was done to John McGahern or Edna O'Brien in the 1960s?
It's possible that a settled consensus on the tangled issue of gender is unattainable. So be it. As a society, we will still have to figure out a way of making space for people who say things that others don't want to hear.
Is it really acceptable that they should be sought out and destroyed?
The irony is that those doing the destroying would be outraged if accused of following in the footsteps of the Censorship of Publications Board.
At least Archbishop McQuaid would have openly admitted he was trying to "cancel” McGahern and O'Brien.
His latterday secular heirs vehemently deny they're trying to silence anyone, insisting instead that they're merely holding people to account for their horrible opinions. Like the church of old, they too think that, when they decide a course of action, they generally have a good reason.
In many ways, what is happening is more pernicious now that censorship is no longer an official act of the stale and pale men in suits and has become, instead, one undertaken by zealots.
When he introduced a bill to reform the Censorship Board in 1967, then justice minister Brian Lenihan Snr said the standard to which it must hold itself was that of the "average mature and responsible adult”.
These days, mature and responsible adults have left the room, and it's the shrillest, most immature and immoderate voices which dominate - and no one dares stand up to them.
There was huge protest among the artistic community at the time when McGahern's book was banned.
Six decades on, Murphy's fellow artists collude in, and sometimes cheer on, the silencing of dissenting voices, either because they're too afraid to put their heads above the parapet, lest they become a target of the mob, too, or because they are fully supportive of driving out apostates.
There's also little political debate to match the famous Seanad row in November 1942, when Sir John Keane denounced that era's censors as a "literary Gestapo” for "turning the whole country into a national seminary”.
The worst of it is that there is no longer any escape route.
After he was fired from his job, McGahern was able to slip over to London and continue teaching. There, his memoir recalls, he received letters from many other teachers who'd "run foul” of some bishop or priest and been left with "no recourse but to disappear silently into Britain”.
There is no disappearing silently in the age of social media. The internet follows you everywhere, forgetting and forgiving nothing. Apologies, however grovelling, don't work.
Where can Murphy go to hide out from the hunters? The record label which has thrown her to the hounds is itself London-based. There is no corner of the Earth to which her transgression would not follow her.
It's not for nothing that the comedian Stewart Lee once described social media as "a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers”. Their pernicious control is far harder to fight than any Censorship Board ever was.
When will their victims get a letter of support from the Taoiseach?
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