As a change from today's news and today's weather, a look into a journal of the past. The first sentence to catch the eye is: "We have not exorcised physical force out of Ireland yet by any means." So wrote AE or one of his collaborators in The Irish Statesman in September, 1928. A group of men armed with revolvers had held up the mail outside Mullingar and had burned thousands of newspapers "doubtless concerned lest principles detrimental to, or subversive of pubic morality should be spread in Ireland."
We might assume, today that the newspapers were probably English Sunday newspapers, so often the source of political and religious anxieties in the past. As when one such newspaper serialised what was then a daring sexy novel Forever Amber in its general run, but substituted for this part of Ireland, a life of a Pope. Anyway, these "censors with revolvers" as AE's journal called them, "seem to be prepared to commit murder, and we can only assume that holding up trains with revolvers, cuttings telegraph and telephone wires, and burning goods are activities, which in their opinion are not subversive of public morality. What is to be the next move? Are private houses to be raided for books as, a few years ago, they were raided for arms? Will we have bombs thrown into bookshops?"
And the writer noted that none of our own dailies criticised the action of the marauders. "Were, they discreetly pleased?" And he warned that if there were no public opinion directed against this form of censorship, "they may find their own papers burned later on to give a better chance for some rival paper whose principles are approved of by the marauders." And the final words "We foresee that the world outside the Free State is going to be greatly amused by its intellectual activities." Another constant in our life in the same issue: criticism of the currency. The new notes meant that Lady Lavery's face will in a month become the most familiar face in the Free State. Sir John Lavery, who had put his wife's face on the notes, had painted his most popular picture, for Ireland anyway.
But, on the other side of the note: "we do not know who is the gentleman out of whose head fish grew instead of hair, and who carries on top of the fish a basket of apples - or is it potatoes . . . he is no Irish divinity whose effigy we can recognise.
Is it an attempt to symbolise Finlan or Mananan Mac Lir?" And so on.