Sex penetrates Irish purity

Elsewhere in this week's Ticket, Kieran J Walsh, producer of the saucy Sensationand director of the lubricious TV show Raw, suggests that Irish audiences are no longer scandalised by sex on screen.

That hasn't stopped certain tabloid newspapers from attempting to manufacture new controversies. Earlier this week, the Irish Daily Mailfeigned outrage at the news that, whereas the British Board of Film Classification granted the upcoming Brünoan 18 cert, The Irish Film Classification Office handed the film – in which Sacha Baron Cohen's gay fashionista terrorises middle-America – a supposedly lenient 16 cert. The paper also noted that our classifiers have dared to allow Lars von Trier's Antichristinto the country without cutting any penetration, degradation or genital mutilation.

Some conservative fulminators will, without having seen either film, bemoan the fact that we are now apparently more decadent than the British. Some progressives, again untainted by a glimpse of the relevant movies, will rejoice that we exceed our former colonisers in liberalism. Most sensible people will shrug their shoulders and turn to the sports page.