It would be comforting to imagine that Mary Ellen Synon's decision to describe the Paralympics as "perverse" and its athletes as "cripples" who "wobble around a track in a wheelchair" was a momentary misjudgment or even a hamfisted attempt at humour. But the Sunday Independent columnist has seldom made any secret of her contempt for those who do not meet her standards of normality.

In 1996 she launched an attack on the entire Travelling community using rhetoric which would not, in its portrayal of an entire ethnic group as essentially sub-human, have been out of place in Nazi diatribes against Jews.

Travellers, she wrote in the Sunday In- dependent, lead "a life of appetite ungoverned by intellect. . . a life worse than the life of beasts. . . This tinker `culture' is without achievement, discipline, reason or intellectual ambition."

The only surprise, she added, was that "some individuals among the tinkers find the will not to become evil". It was clear from the context that she wanted her readers to feel that the majority of Travellers were evil.

In 1998 Miss Synon argued that if the source of intolerance and hatred felt by some Irish people towards Ireland's "exotic newcomers" (immigrants and asylum-seekers) had "a logical basis", then it should be acted on. She went on to say that "Ireland, already split by religion, is about to be tinted by colour".

With such form behind her, it seems clear that the Sunday Independent knew its columnist had a penchant for targeting entire groups with hate-filled rhetoric and that it was happy for her to continue to do so.

Last Sunday's outburst, moreover, had deep roots in the New Right political culture to which Miss Synon emphatically belongs. Milton Friedman, the intellectual guru of Thatcherism and Reaganism, pointed to the natural physical differences between people as evidence that we were not, after all, meant to be equal.

"Life is not fair," he wrote in his hugely influential Free To Choose. "It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned." But this temptation must be resisted because "there's nothing fair about Marlene Dietrich's having been born with beautiful legs that we all want to look at; or with Muhammad Ali having been born with the skill that made him a great fighter".

Conversely, of course, people who are born with cerebral palsy or a visual impairment should not expect government to interfere with "what nature has spawned". In a similar vein, Margaret Thatcher talked contemptuously of people "dribbling and drooling about compassion".

Miss Synon's article last Sunday, therefore, merely made explicit what is implicit in much of the New Right ideology. What she objected to in the Paralympics is that they suggest (as they undoubtedly do) that "all lives are equal in value".

If many of her colleagues on the radical Right would probably prefer that she had not put it so bluntly, few of them have any great difficulty acting on the belief that all lives are not of equal value and that those of the disabled, the poor or members of ethnic minorities are clearly of lesser importance than those of, for example, Sunday In- dependent columnists.

YET, like it or not, the New Right is one of the most influential strands in current political thinking. How far, then, should a newspaper editor go in censoring the expression of that ideology? And should the general outrage at Miss Synon's attack be backed up with legal sanctions or, if necessary, tougher laws? Where is the line between the robust expression of controversial views and incitement to hatred?

Part of the problem is that the people who should answer that question in the first instance - the editors of the newspaper in question - seemed all at sea this week. Aengus Fanning and the Sunday Independent at first stood over the decision to publish Miss Synon's rant, citing a liberal policy of encouraging the expression of different views.

Then as official and unofficial expressions of disgust continued to rain down on him, Mr Fanning issued an abject apology for the offence caused. The two statements were hardly compatible.

Nor, however, has the law been notably more effective. Though Travellers' groups tried to have Miss Synon prosecuted under the Incitement to Hatred Act for her sweeping attack on their community, the director of public prosecutions at the time did not feel there was a strong enough case.

Yet it is hard to see why, when a busdriver who racially abuses a black passenger is prosecuted and sentenced, the mass dissemination of such insults through a national newspaper should not result in legal sanctions.

Freedom of expression is a vital aspect of democracy. However, most democracies accept that it is limited in particular by two considerations. In the first place, free expression should not incite violence against others. In the second, it should not result, through the use of dehumanising stereotypes against entire groups, in a denial of the ability of members of those groups to exercise their rights to free expression.

Miss Synon's characterisation of the lives of people with disabilities as being of lesser value than those of others arguably breaches the first rule. Her contemptuous belittlement of them certainly breaches the second.

Journalists and editors have long argued that they are responsible enough to understand and apply those distinctions without the intervention of the law. After Miss Synon's rant, and her editors' confused response to it, that case has been damaged, perhaps irreparably.

fotoole@irish-times.ie