JUST when you thought the Celtic tiger had shed decades of claustrophobic state supervision, along comes a new layer of censorship to shatter the illusion — only this time it’s online.

The registrar of the Irish .ie internet domain extension has decided it must try to shield people from smut on the internet and, as a standard-bearing start, has banned use of the word “porn”.

A businessman who tried to register the Porn.ie domain name has been refused under Section 3.4 of .ie naming policy, which states that website addresses “must not be offensive or contrary to public policy or generally accepted principles of morality”.

So while we can all happily download porn movies from Porn.co.uk, and our French cousins can get down and dirty in their own language at Porn.fr, surfers hunting the Irish equivalent will draw a big blank.

Porn.ie joins some distinguished company. In the past Playboy magazine, the News of the World, the film A Clockwork Orange and writers such as John McGahern and even Barbara Cartland have been censored in Ireland. At one point 1,500 books were banned.

According to both the Irish registrar of the .ie internet domain extension and the Companies Registration Office (CRO), the word “porn” is a danger to public morality.

The application to register Porn.ie was made by Stephen Ryan, 28, from Dublin, who describes himself as a “typical Irish IT worker” with a sideline in running websites.

“They aren’t saying the act of porn is offensive or immoral, they’re saying the word is,” Ryan complained last week. “This baffles me for a number of reasons. How is a word immoral? The act of rape is immoral, but the word ‘rape’ isn’t. It’s the same with murder. Why doesn’t this logic apply to porn, whether or not they think porn is immoral?” The Companies Registration Office (CRO) refused Ryan’s application to register the word as a business name, telling him his request was being returned as the name “could be deemed to be offensive to others”.

Ryan insists he wants to be “clever and quite arty” on Porn.ie, constructing a website with beautiful photographs that are “honest enough to admit what they are, ie porn”.

Ryan also runs Dole.ie, which collates vacancies from Irish employment agency sites, and Sex.ie, which provides a forum for casual sexual liaisons and posts articles and statistics about safe sex, health and contraception.

“I’m just a normal guy,” he said. “I’m not a pornographer. I don’t own a sex shop, I work for a big multinational.

“It doesn’t make any sense. Porn is perfectly legal in Ireland. I don’t know why they feel that they should be outlawing it and I don’t know how they feel they should be allowed to. What do they want us to call it, dirty pictures?” The IE Domain Registry (IEDR) defended its decision last week, saying it made group decisions on possibly controversial registrations.

The body, which describes itself as “an independent not-for-profit organisation that manages the .ie country code . . . in the public interest of the Irish and global internet communities”, said 10 applications for “porn” have been refused since September 2001. But the IEDR says it seems to be the only word refused so far under section 3.4 of the naming policy.

It is now drawing up a list of words that will not be considered for websites on the national .ie domain.

The body said sites with names such as F***.ie or C***.ie would almost certainly be included, as would the seven “dirty words” made famous in a 1972 monologue by George Carlin, the comedian.

Carlin’s sketch on censorship backfired and the Federal Communications Commission banned his seven examples, including tits and motherf*****, from being broadcast on television and radio.

When the American army handed over the first version of the internet to the public in 1992, control was given to Network Solutions Inc, which banned the words again, sparking a series of freedom-of-speech cases that liberated .com and .net domain names worldwide in 1999.

Even before that one of Carlin’s seven words was liberated in a case over a site purporting to be about shiitake mushrooms, helped by the number of Japanese companies with shit- prefixes.

In Ireland all .ie domains are managed by the IEDR, which says it offers a “managed service where, unlike other domain names, entitlement to the .ie name is established and cybersquatting is eliminated”. One of the benefits, it claims, is control of new registrations.

Ryan isn’t convinced this is a benefit. “It’s not like with .com, where there were words that certain registers didn’t allow you to get, for example Register.com wouldn’t let you have F***.com, but you could go to a competitor and they would,” he said. “But because there’s only one .ie crowd I’ve no choice in the matter, they have the final say.

“I thought we’d moved past this — it’s not as if anyone is going to be blown away by the fact there might be porn on the internet.”
Adding to Ryan’s frustration is that Porn.com, Porn.org, Porn.co.uk and Porn.eu are all open for business. One of the numerous online chat sites that debated his plight last week listed a number of other domains with sexual innuendo “not registered within the .ie zone” and concluded that the IEDR “really does take this porn thing rather seriously”.