LET this be a warning to the Irish political parties venturing on to a web site. The British Labour party is urgently reviewing security on its web site after it was "hacked" over the weekend.

The unidentified hackers raided the Labour Party site, changing the title "The road to the Manifesto" to "The road to nowhere".

They also changed links to other parts of the site so they read "The Labour Party sex shop" and transferred visitors to what has been described as a "smutty sex site".

Jeraint Hazan, managing director of On line Publishing, the company that set up and looks after the site, said he was sure the hackers had obtained a secret password to access the site.

"We put the site back to normal in about 20 minutes," said Mr Hazan. "There will always be people who are bright enough who can get into a site and hack it.