Disability groups have expressed outrage at comments by a Sunday Independent journalist, Miss Mary Ellen Synon, about disabled athletes competing in the Paralympics.
Miss Synon, in a column published yesterday, describes the Paralympics currently under way in Sydney as "grotesque" and "perverse".
Physical competition, she says, "is not about finding someone who can wobble his way around a track in a wheelchair, or who can swim from one end of a pool to the other by braille".
"Yet we are supposed to imagine that there is some kind of equivalence in value between what the cripples do and what the truly fastest, strongest, highest do. There isn't."
The Disability Federation of Ireland last night described the remarks as "deeply offensive, hurtful and destructive" of the expectations of people with disabilities.
"Those athletes she describes as cripples, the lame and the blind, are trying very hard to participate in another race - the human race," said the chief executive of DFI, Mr John Dolan. "This article dehumanises and belittles the humanity of many people."
Mr Roger Acton, chairperson of Vantastic, a voluntary organisation providing wheelchair-accessible transport, said he was "outraged" by Miss Synon's "ill-advised comments".
"But it's hard to know whether to take them seriously or to treat them with the contempt they deserve."
In the article, Miss Synon says: "One must question the propaganda that says one ought to applaud the physical performance of the lame as we applaud the physical performance of the fit." Such propaganda was "all of a piece" and was designed to convince people that all cultures, lives and philosophies were equal in value.
In 1996, Miss Synon said the life of Travellers was "worse than the life of beasts". Critics called unsuccessfully for her prosecution under incitement to hatred legislation.
