The Dark ban controversy and Sean's dismissal

The Dark ban controversy and John McGahern’s dismissal turned a novel’s censorship into a confrontation over who could teach, who could judge a teacher’s private life, and whether an individual could be pressured to leave quietly. The book was seized and banned in Ireland while its author was abroad; when he returned to his school at the end of his leave, he was welcomed by colleagues but legally barred from entering the classroom. The dispute reached the Dáil and revealed that other teachers had also been driven out of Ireland after conflicts with Church authorities.

Writing, travel, and the ban

In the winter of 1963–64, John McGahern wrote The Dark in Dublin, by his later account too quickly. He also won the Macauley Award, worth £1,000 and conditional on the winner travelling abroad for a year. The sum was substantial: at the time, it could buy a small house in Dublin. In the summer he met Annikki Laaksi, a Finnish theatre director, in Paris. That October his school granted him a year’s leave without pay so he could take up the award. He went to Helsinki, married Annikki later that year, and then left Finland, which he did not feel he could live in. The couple moved first to London and then to Spain, where they borrowed a house on the Almería coast.

The Dark appeared in London in May 1965. Irish Customs seized it, and it was banned in Ireland. The timing placed John McGahern at a distance from the controversy but did not keep him outside its reach. Before the ban, he had treated the Censorship Board as a joke: most prohibited books seemed unworthy of attention, while the worthwhile ones remained obtainable. He had not imagined that censorship would touch his own work or life. Once it did, he regarded the affair as childish and unpleasant, and felt some shame that the independent country was making a fool of itself again. He privately wondered whether writing the novel more slowly and carefully might have kept it from notice. Yet he refused to join a protest, reasoning that doing so would give the affair more importance than it deserved.

The attempted return to school

While in London, John McGahern wrote to the school to say that he intended to return when his year’s leave ended. The headmaster warned that there would be difficulty and advised him to seek work in London, offering references. The advice anticipated the pressure to treat departure as the proper, quiet solution; John McGahern was determined not to accept it. The school had been his livelihood for many years, and although he wanted no part in the censorship campaign, he would not leave without challenging what was being done to him.

He crossed to Dublin and appeared at the school on the day he was due back, without notifying anyone and with no journalists present. The staff were on edge, but welcomed him warmly. When the bell rang, a deeply embarrassed headmaster, Mr Kelleher, read aloud a legal letter from the manager barring John McGahern from entering the classroom. He read it in the corridor, standing with his back to the door of John McGahern’s old classroom. Father Carton, the parish priest of Clontarf and the school manager, had gone on holiday to avoid the unpleasantness.

The prohibition did not immediately empty the day of its ordinary human exchanges. John McGahern remained at the school; the headmaster tried to make him comfortable, gave him a newspaper, and observed, “Hardly a day goes by but there’s something about you in the paper, A Mhaistir,” with pity. There were endless cups of tea and a pleasant lunch with former colleagues. At 2.15, they all left together as if it had been an ordinary school day. That carefully maintained normality stood beside the legal letter: the staff’s welcome did not undo the ban on teaching, but it refused to make the dismissed teacher a stranger among them.

The stated reasons and the marriage

John McGahern still had to meet Father Carton after the priest returned from holiday. Carton saw him reluctantly and said, in a roundabout way, that the order had come from the Archbishop and that he himself was not to blame. He told John McGahern, “You have gone and ruined your life,” and complained that journalists were making his own life miserable. When the Teachers’ Union pressed for an explanation, Carton answered in writing, “Mr McGahern is well aware of the reason for his dismissal.” The official response named no reason, leaving the institution’s decisive power more visible than any formal account of its grounds.

The Teachers’ Union board received John McGahern late one afternoon. Its members were cautious and hostile; some had taken whiskey to brace themselves for the meeting. Newspaper reports had disclosed that he had married a Finnish woman in a register office. The General Secretary, another Kelleher, had also fortified himself with whiskey, and his irritation broke through his caution. He said, “If it was just the auld book, maybe – maybe – we might have been able to do something for you, but with marrying this foreign woman you have turned yourself into a hopeless case entirely.” He then asked, “And what anyhow entered your head to go and marry this foreign woman when there are hundreds of thousands of Irish girls going around with their tongues out for a husband?” The remarks made the marriage more than incidental gossip: the Union’s representative presented it as compounding the book controversy and making John McGahern impossible to defend.

Public controversy and the wider pattern

The dispute moved beyond the school. Letters for and against John McGahern appeared in newspapers, and the issue was debated on television and radio. The protest that mattered most to him came from parents of children he had taught; outside that response, he said, he did not greatly care. In the Dáil, Brendan Corish, the Labour Party leader, asked the Minister of Education how the State could pay for teachers’ training and salaries, and for the running of schools, yet have no say in hiring or firing them regardless of their rights as citizens. He also asked for a satisfactory reason for John McGahern’s dismissal. The question drew attention to the divide between public funding and control over employment.

The Minister answered, “When the Church decides on a course of action, it generally has a good reason for that action.” The book’s legal position sharpened the contradiction: selling a banned book was a statutory offence, but writing one was not. The response in the Dáil did not supply a reason specific to John McGahern; instead, it defended Church decisions in general. After a BBC television programme, letters arrived from men trained at St Patrick’s Training College who were teaching in Birmingham, Glasgow, and Newcastle. They wrote that they had been dismissed after falling foul of a bishop or priest, or infringing Catholic dogma, and had no recourse but to disappear silently into Britain. Their experiences made the McGahern Case part of a larger pattern of enforced departure, which the memoir connects to the phrase “Ni beidh sibh arais.”

Return visits and consequences

John McGahern returned to London, where he was glad to be away from the newspaper letters and broadcast debates. His father continued writing to him. When John McGahern visited his father and Agnes at Grevisk after losing his job, his father took his side and wanted to attack those responsible; John McGahern wryly observed that with allies like his father, enemies were unnecessary. This support did not resolve the estrangement between his father and Annikki. On a visit the following summer, Annikki immediately disliked Ireland, seeing it as paternalistic, duplicitous, and dominated by priests, and was particularly angered by the position of women. John McGahern regarded her judgment as incomplete but understood that she would not have agreed to live in Ireland even if he had kept his post. In that sense, he concluded, the dismissal had become matterless.

Annikki also disliked his father and would not stay more than one night in his house. His father disliked her in turn, but, once he saw that she was not afraid of him, became intrigued by her foreignness and beauty. By then, the possibility of a shared life in Ireland had passed. In a letter addressed to both of them, his father wrote about rose bushes and patience: “The thorns are there to prick but still the beautiful bloom comes again and again – if you have patience.” John McGahern had never noticed his father’s love of roses and found the reflection hilarious. The letter offered no reversal of the dismissal or reconciliation between the men; instead, it leaves the episode with the gap between the father’s polished consolation and the son’s amused, unresolved view of him.