The Press Ombudsman has decided not to uphold a complaint by Mr Phillip Fay that an item published in the Sunday Independent on 18 December 2011 was a breach of Principle 8 (Prejudice) of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines.
Mr Fay complained that a cartoon, including the caption, was offensive to Catholics and bordering on blasphemy. The newspaper said that it did not believe that the cartoon breached the Code of Practice.
A cartoon in a newspaper is a satirical or humorous item – sometimes political, sometimes religious, sometimes neither, often disrespectful and sometimes provocative – based on the cartoonist’s opinion. The fact that a cartoon may offend some people does not in itself mean that it presents a breach of the Code of Practice. In this particular case any offence generated by the cartoon in question is not of the gravity required to support a complaint under Principle 8 of the Code of Practice.