The horse snorted just inches away from the face of the female garda who had ordered the boy to stop and was pointing him into the Smithfield horse market. He ignored her, looking to her two male colleagues who kept their backs turned, sipping tea and laughing.

In twos and threes, horse traders looked up. Tension rose. The female garda, with infinite patience and firmness made clear her serene immovability. This went on for what seemed an hour until finally the boy, no more than 11, turned his horse and with his head held high cantered into the market as if that was always his intention.

It was at that moment I understood what, on its best days, makes An Garda Siochana different.

Consent , , grounded in respect, however grudging.

In few places I've been is the blue line quite so thin.

But then how else could you police a people whose cardinal virtues do not include automatic respect for authority, without a massive and overwhelming force housed in garrisons?

This nearly unique, unarmed model of policing was not just an experiment in democratic civic virtue.

It made a virtue of necessity. In 1922, when the first young recruits to the brand new force were taken from Dublin to an old garrison in Kildare to be drilled by ex-Royal Irish Constabulary officers like Cavan man Patrick McAvinia, badge number 2, who had resigned in 1917 rather than force young men into conscription to be sent to another Somme, they mutinied. The incident led directly to the establishment of a force whose principal weapon would be consent , , and, not coincidentally, a force that would be in no position to mutiny again with anything more deadly than blue flu.

Has the potential for mutiny really gone away?

When voicing resistance to the introduction of a new garda reserve, what exactly do GRA general secretary PJ Stone and other garda representative officials intend when threatening to "do whatever is required to make sure that this reserve force does not work"?

Stone and his clique insist gardai will refuse to cooperate with the establishment of the Garda Reserve unless its very existence is negotiated.

This isn't about how the reserve is implemented , , about which there are reasonable questions.

Personally I wonder if the recommendation that reserve members be prevented from patrolling their own neighbourhoods doesn't undermine one of the key benefits , , to re-establish authentic connections between gardai and the communities they police.

In fact, it smacks of something of a concession to lurid charges by GRA and AGSI sources that the reserve will become a haven of criminals and local bullies looking to settle scores.

But it is nothing short of astonishing that men who claim to represent the interests of gardai should betray the central promise from which the force hasn't wavered since the Kildare mutiny . . . to enforce the lawful, democratic will of the Irish people. The Garda Bill was debated vigorously in both houses of the Oireachtas, and passed into law. Its merits have been debated in public for years, including provision for a Garda Reserve. In the end the people's representatives, gloriously flawed and vain though they may be, chose to enact them into law.

Stone's exhortations are disturbing, to say the least.

But not terribly surprising.

A quick tour of the GRA's website, (www. gra. cc) which looks like it was designed and written by the 12-year-old son of the generalissimo of a South American junta in 1996, gives you a sense of what sort of minds are at work here.

The sense of unjust treatment, frothed into rage against the media and politicians, is palpable.

There are some aspects of the job that gardai are absolutely correct to complain about. Some stations were allowed to fall into horrific disrepair.

Some portions of the force fostered fiefdoms of petty power games and venality.

There are proper ways of dealing with those issues, and most of them are being addressed. What the GRA and AGSI are doing now comes perilously close to what section 59(2)(b) of the Garda Siochana Act (2005) defines as an offence with a five-year prison term, inducing any garda "to withhold his or her services or to commit a breach of discipline".

Perhaps even worse than that, Stone betrays his own members with his approach, which makes the blue line so thin you can see right through it. How can that female guard uphold the law using consent if her representatives so publicly refuse to consent to it?

Who would pull in the reins when such a person says stop?