Not many of us are pure enough to cast first stone

A dear colleague of mine who departed The Connacht Tribune last week, Bernie Ní Fhlatharta, unearthed a rare little insight into the social history of Ireland in the form of correspondence between the Board of the Connacht Tribune and then Bishop of Galway, Michael Browne.

You can read about this in more depth in a feature that Bernie has written to be published over the coming weeks, but in summary the exchange between the Church and the local media, tells its own tale of what Ireland was like back in the 1950s.

It’s a story so bizarre, that it’s almost unbelievable, but happen it did when the works department of the Connacht Tribune back in 1950, printed a black and white edition of Playboy magazine, a publication that was but a very pale shadow of the full frontals that adorn its current pages.

Playboy, back in 1950, was published in glorious black and white with some of the more ‘suggestive pictures’ showing girls stretching their legs with not a hint of underwear to be seen, or a model wearing a figure hugging jumper.

Three of the articles in that magazine carried the headings, ‘When Boy Kisses Girl’, ‘Perfume Makes a Girl Bewitching’ and ‘Dancing Time for Gals and Pals’, so as you might glean this was pretty harmless stuff.

However the Bishop of Galway got word of this publication being printed in the heart of this most catholic of cities and he immediately penned a letter for immediate consideration as it was a ‘matter of importance and urgency’.

The ‘When Boy Kisses Girl’ article really got the Bishop’s blood boiling (I can’t help but thinking of the image of Bishop Brennan in Father Ted), who described the piece as ‘grossly irreverent, if not blasphemous’.

Anyway with the times that were in it, the Connacht Tribune wrote back to the Bishop in an obvious state of absolute mortification at their ‘wrongdoing’ in printing such a work of fornication, and sent a deputation to Wexford to try and find out who had sourced the publication. The letter was signed off: ‘I remain, Your Lordship’s obedient servant’.

That was less than six decades ago and I thought to myself what a changed Ireland we live in today after a Government Minister, Leo Veradkar ‘came out’ and said he was a gay man, while later this summer, we will all be voting on a referendum to legalise marriage between two men, or between two women.

The other night in the local, a fair debate raged between opposite sides of the fence on gay marriage, and little residues of ‘old Ireland’ still do survive with strong views expressed that it just ‘wasn’t right’ for people of the same sex to legally marry under the laws of the land.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.