RTE’s war on use of certain words raises questions about censorship

“I intend giving this warning to everyone — you will not on this programme, you or anyone else, use the word ‘homophobia’. You will not use that word about anybody”. So said Joe Duffy on the RTÉ Liveline programme last Friday.

And thus Joe Duffy takes a perfectly serviceable word and bans it entirely from his programme. He did not ask contributors to be careful about it, didn’t ask that they use it in a legally sensitive way, nor that they qualify their meaning of the term.

It’s bad enough if this was just Joe Duffy being over cautious, but I suspect it isn’t as simple as that.