Irish Writers' Union

The Irish Writers' Union (IWU) is an organisation devoted to furthering the professional interests and needs of writers in various media in Ireland. The Union is based in the centre of Dublin at 19 Parnell Square.

The foundations for the Irish Writers' Union were laid in 1985 when Jack Harte, at that time principal of Lucan Vocational School, Co. Dublin, set up a writers' advisory office, availing of the Social Employment Scheme. Harte employed a secretary and two workers in this office, one of whom, Joe Jackson, went on to become Ireland's first Writer-in-Residence. From the outset, the aim of the project Harte had in mind was to establish a Writers' Union and an Irish Writers' Centre.

Still working from his base in Lucan, Harte employed the poet Padraig MacGrane to collect names of writers, setting up a preliminary social network of people who could be contacted. Names and contact details were obtained in a rather informal manner, often handwritten on spare scraps of paper.

With his contact list completed, in the summer of 1986 Harte sent out a letter to all those on it, outlining the plans and objectives of the proposed Union and asking the recipients if they were interested in joining. Most of those contacted expressed an interest.

In the autumn of 1986, approximately 120 members-to-be met up in Buswell's Hotel, Kildare Street, Dublin to hammer out the Constitution of the Writers' Union. Over a three-hour meeting, from three to six o'clock of a Saturday afternoon, a 65-clause Constitution was worked out. The Irish Writers Union was launched on 15 December 1987 at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. The Constitution came into effect as of 1 January 1987, and the Writers' Union was founded. Harte was its first Chairperson, a post he was to maintain for three years.

Among the issues facing the Union was the question of authors' rights over their work, and the rights of authors and publishers alike. From its early years, the IWU supported the idea of a model contract for writers and advised authors in this regard, helping writers negotiate their contracts with publishers. To this day, this service remains central to the activities of the Union.

The question of who owned the copyright to a published work was ambiguous in Ireland in the 1980s and in part due to the efforts of the Irish Writers' Union the situation was clarified in keeping with best practice internationally. Today Irish publishing contracts accord with Ireland's Copyright & Related Rights Act, 2000 and state unambiguously that the author is the copyright holder.

The censorious attitude of the Irish state towards a wide variety of publications and movies was a very restrictive one through much of the mid twentieth century; many books now considered central to Ireland's literary heritage, such as James Joyce's Ulysses, were banned from sale or distribution in Ireland. Although Brian Lenihan, Snr introduced the Censorship of Publications Act, 1967 whereby the previously permanent ban on a given work was replaced by a twelve-year ban (and later a five-year ban), this did little to assist the distribution of short-lived works.

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