A Leading Northern Ireland toy-chain's decision not to stock Harry Potter merchandise as it may attract children to the occult could be a "bad case of the muggles".
The Belfast-based company Toy Town, which has nine branches across the North and three in Britain, said its decision not to sell anything connected with the boy wizard was a "matter of conscience" - the company's stores will, however, continue to sell toy guns including a toy Uzi sub-machine gun.
The decision is likely to cost Toy Town thousands of pounds in lost revenue as Potter mania is about to hit Ireland. The latest book in the remarkably successful series Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sold over 330,000 copies on its first day of sale while the first film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is due for release on November 16th.
Toy Town's managing director, Mr Alan Simpson, said there were issues of conscience which had to go before profit. "Black magic and wizardry have a lot more power over the mind than what children will actually play with such as toy guns. If children don't get toy guns, they will use pieces of wood. We don't want to encourage children to go down the road of the occult."
Nobody from the author J.K. Rowling's publishing house Bloomsbury could be contacted for comment. However, a leading reviewer of children's books and lecturer in English at the Church of Ireland Training Centre in Dublin, Mr Robert Dunbar, dismissed Toy Town's decision as a "very bad case of the muggles".
"The muggles are those adults who have lost - if indeed they ever had - any sense of magic and I fear what we have just been hearing proves there are some of those still around.
"The notion of violence - if that is what is being zoomed in on - is something of a red herring for the simple reason that it is not a predominant motive in the books at all. The books are, in a word, about magic. They are about the transformational power that really good writing affords children. The kind of notion we have heard expressed does a tremendous disservice to today's young people because the implication is that they are not able to distinguish between what is real and what is fantasy," he told BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme yesterday.