The chief executive of the Equality Authority wrote an article in a newspaper last Sunday week suggesting that a press council might be a vehicle for spreading equality values. That is not my purpose in proposing a press council and I would be wholly opposed to it. No matter how laudable or questionable equality values may be, the purpose of a press council is not to act as an organ of a new civic religion established by law to tell the media what line they must take on certain issues. An article such as Mary Ellen Synon's on the Paralympics, which was deemed offensive by most people, is one which it is possible to write, even if it is offensive, without infringing the law. We must be very careful before we go down the road of censoring people's taste and requiring them not to be offensive. That could turn us into a very suffocating society indeed.