SAM SMYTH: I would think that people. . . across Ireland are absolutely outraged by the way you've written about this?

MARY ELLEN SYNON: Well, I can't control or be responsible for anybody else's outrage. The question about anything I write in the paper is - is it accurate? Is it reasonable? And I think it is both.

SS: What is your point? Do you think it [the Paralympics] is a waste of public money?

MES: There's that. But the bigger issue is that the whole warm-hearted applause for this stuff is part of the larger propaganda that says one ought to applaud the physical performance of the lame in the same way that one applauds the physical performance of the fit. In other words, there is a propaganda out there that believes there are no objective criteria for excellence in any field - that what counts is effort. And actually in life, for reasonable people, what counts is results.

Now all of this is part of the propaganda that wants to convince you, for example, that all cultures are equal, that all religions are equal in value and all lives are equal in value and no one is supposed to be judgmental; that is, no one is supposed to establish through rational means, criteria, and then observe and decide whether an athletic performance or an intellectual activity or a philosophy is actually better or more valuable than another one. You're just supposed to embrace everything that involves effort and say `isn't that marvellous?' - and yet the problem is that if all cultures and all philosophies and all lives are equal in value, then none of them is worth very much.

SS: I know you don't have a television at home - I know this because you told me. . . The Paralympics do get a lot of television coverage but I think a lot of people do genuinely applaud the effort of people who in so many ways live much more restricted lives, often in pain and under the worst possible circumstances.

MES: I would never try to stop anybody from applauding whoever they want to applaud and I would never stop anyone, whether he's a very fit 25-year-old or a 55year-old in a wheelchair, doing or attempting to do whatever he wants. What I'm simply saying is that people ought to stop and think: what are they applauding when they're applauding this? What are they applauding?

SS: The effort, I suggest, that the people are making to compete. . .

MES (sighing): What value is effort?

SS: What value is effort? - an awful lot to the people who are competing.

MES: Fine, let them have it. But let me say that if life depends only on effort and not production, we're all going to starve pretty quickly.