The Blushless Press

"Take two shots," was the standard order to London Sunday Dispatch photographers, "one for England, the other for Ireland." In a sizzling heat wave, the photographers were out on the bathing-suit beat, and while the average British daily carried enough cheesecake for a Berlin banquet, editions exported to Ireland featured proper young women in street clothes. There was no alternative: Roman Catholic Ireland's law and custom have long forced Irish newspapers to adopt one of the most rigorous self-censorships of any free press in the world.

The taboos--stemming mostly from public moral attitude--center on indecency, concentrated coverage of crime, advocacy of birth control, and offense to the clergy. Dublin's biggest daily, the Irish Independent, built its circulation (171,728) on the boast that it could be read by the oldest mother superior in the smallest convent in Ireland without bringing a blush to her cheeks.

In an effort to measure at least part way up to such an example, English editors have placed unsavory divorces on their Irish forbidden list, along with ads or news stories on football pools, sex crimes, abortion and contraception. Venereal disease has not been mentioned in the Irish press in modern memory, and artificial insemination of barnyard animals is primly reduced to initials--A.I.--from Ballyshannon to Bantry Bay.

For their Irish editions, English editors usually kill the sex-and-scandal stories they so favor at home. The Empire News recently killed a series headed YES, VICAR . . . I'M HAVING A BABY, substituted SAVED DE VALERA FROM THE FIRING SQUAD. London's lip-smacking The People last week shelved a picture of Marilyn Monroe in a two-piece bathing suit, substituted one of the triple wedding of some County Mayo girls. Says a Dublin newsman: "When you see an English paper writing about Lourdes or the Irish saints, you can bet that the space in home editions was filled with i WAS A TEEN-AGE SEX MANIAC."

In the Irish press proper, taut censorship is maintained vigilantly by the newsmen themselves, from country correspondents, who will fail to phone in a story because it "isn't nice," to city editors, who generally accept all "conventions," do not think of them as actual censorship. All of which has led to an adage that pretty accurately describes the Irish press: "It doesn't matter what happens, as long as it doesn't get into the paper."

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