The Ban
Roisin Agnew / Ireland & United Kingdom / 2024 / 26 min
Censorship and resistance collide in a curious but disquieting case study from Northern Ireland in the 1980s, where the media found a way out by dubbing all interviews with the IRA and Sinn Féin.
At the bloody height of the conflict between Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics in the 1980s, ultra-conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher imposed a ban on giving media time to representatives of the IRA and Sinn Féin. The idea was to stifle their rebellion against the British by refusing them the ‘oxygen of publicity’. The problem was that in legal terms the law only applied to voices, so the situation took a bizarre turn when the free media for years hired professional actors to dub their interviews with the Irish rebels. ‘The Ban’ is a sharp case study in censorship and resistance with disturbing echoes in the present.