Frank O’Connor: Gamekeeper turned poacher

Frank O’Connor, who lends his name to the world’s richest prize for a short story collection at this week’s Cork International Short Story Festival, was an eloquent critic of the censorship that blighted independent Ireland’s cultural landscape.

His literary career, which lasted from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s, coincided with the heyday of the notorious Censorship of Publications Board which waged war on modern literature. The Register of Prohibited Publications eventually numbered over 12,000 books, and contained the works of 10 Nobel laureates, including our own Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw.

Curiously, for a writer associated with the fight for freedom of expression, O’Connor’s first encounter with censorship was as a censor. In the first days of the Civil War in early July 1922 a team of anti-Treaty IRA censors, including a young O’Connor (then still known as Michael O’Donovan), moved into the offices of the Cork Examiner. Their job was to slant this pro-Treaty paper’s content to favour the republican cause. The Examiner, the only nationalist daily published outside Dublin, was a key prize in the propaganda war.