Raiders of the Lost Archive: the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Film Industry 1942

Abstract

In 1938, Sean Lemass, as Minister for Industry and Commerce, established a threeman committee with a broad remit to examine and report on every aspect – actual and putative – of the Irish film industry. This report would examine not merely the exhibition, distribution and production of film but also its potential as a cultural force and the extent to which the established censorship regime was fulfilling its obligations to ‘protect public morality against any danger of contamination or deterioration which might threaten it through the influence of cinema’ (RICFI, 1942: 44).1 The committee spent four years working on the report but despite their efforts, it was never published and to all intents and purposes disappeared from both the Department of Industry and Commerce and the National Archive. As a consequence the report acquired an almost mythical status among film scholars: its contents (indeed its very existence) could only be inferred through a few tantalising references in Dail Debates and National Archive documents. As a consequence academic references to the report have been – inevitably and unavoidably – partial and imprecise.2