Criminal Libel, Censorship and Contempt of Court: D.C. Boyd’s Editorship of the Waterford Standard.

David Culbert (D.C.) Boyd, was for much of his career the editor proprietor of the now defunct Waterford Standard newspaper . Initially it would seem unlikely that there was anything to distinguish the Waterford Standard or its editor from numerous other local newspapers being published in Ireland in the 20th century. Indeed, the historical record which, until recently, bore scant or any reference to the newspaper or Boyd. First impressions however, as is so often the case, belie a history that places the Waterford Standard and its editor at the centre of the history of Irish censorship and the struggle for Irish journalistic freedom in the first decades of the State’s formation .