Carroll talks to the real country girls, 50 years on

THIS year marks 50 years since acclaimed Clare author Edna O’Brien’s novel The Country Girls was banned but a radio documentary due to air on St Stephen’s Day will reveal that locals still have reservations about the author and her novel.
For the first time, locals will reveal their thoughts about the controversy that surrounded The County Girls, the banning of the book and the truth about an alleged public burning of the book.
One of the locals to be featured on the programme recollects, “By the time I got the book, it was in a brown, paper cover so you couldn’t see the front of it. And I remember everyone called it a dirty book and I didn’t really understand what that meant. But I wanted to find out why it was dirty.”
The radio documentary entitled A Country Place has been produced by East Clare broadcaster Paula Carroll and Rag and Bone Productions the support of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and will air on Clare FM (96.4 FM) on St Stephen’s Day at 6pm.
Born in Scariff in 1930, Edna O’Brien’s first novel The Country Girls was published in 1960 and tells the story of the lives of two young girls in a place much like her home place in East Clare.
After its publication, the book was banned by the censorship board for being “indecent or obscene”. As a result, both The Country Girls and the author quickly achieved notoriety, not least of all in her native East Clare.
Speaking about the documentary, producer Paula Carroll said, “In all the furore in the censored times of the 1960s and in all the retrospective interviews and newspaper columns about that first notorious book, no one ever sought the opinion of those country girls and boys themselves, whose community was, supposedly, depicted in O’Brien’s first novel. Much has been said about them, no one has heard them speak until now,” Ms Carroll said.
The programme streams live on www.clare.fm at 6pm on St Stephen’s Day.