The rest of us shrug our shoulders though. Hard to get excited when you can't be certain what's smoke and what's mirrors. Hard to feel anything beyond disdain at a time when they look you in the eye and blame the latest failed test on a vengeful masseur.

We come instead to the offices of the Irish Sports Council, hidden away deep within the necklace of Blanchardstown's industrial estates, here to sit down with Dr Una May, the programme manager of the council's antidoping arm. In the greater scheme of war against drugs in sport, she's the captain of a relatively small battalion, fighting on a mostly ignored front. But in the era of Cathal Lombard and Geraldine Hendricken, of Waterford Crystal and Michelle Smith, it's a front that grabs the attention of the wider world more often than it should.

It's from this office that doping is combatted in Ireland. Until recently, Dr May headed up a team of four people until she got funding for another. There is a testing manager, a person to look after checking athletes' whereabouts and ensuring that testing facilities at competitions are secure, another who deals with what are called Therapeutic Use Exceptions (in the most simplistic terms, this is for the people who mount what you might call the cough bottle defence) and then Dr May herself who oversees everything. Ask her if five is enough and she'll reply by asking is a piece of string long enough.

Double the staff and then she'd maybe start to relax, but the truth is she had to move mountains to be allowed get the fifth person on board.

And yet, despite the intermittent headline-grabbers (and, in fact, in so small part because of them), her unit has made Ireland into what she believes is one of the most difficult places to get away with doping. She wouldn't for a minute pretend the system is perfect but she's secure in the knowledge of the progress that has been made.

"I think, to be honest, that it's very, very difficult at this stage for an athlete to take drugs in Ireland. Even if it weren't for us, there's such a culture of suspicion now that everyone's watching everyone and we hear very quickly if there are suspicions circulating about people. The athletes that we have targeted over the past few years have been textbook cases.

People who've improved when they're too old to be improving at that level, people who've come from nowhere. The whole of their sport would have been talking about them before we ever got involved.

"I have no qualms about saying that we targeted Cathal Lombard. Everybody was talking about him, saying that his improvements were too good to be true. And it was as much for his own sake, because if he had been genuine then this was the only way he could have answered the questions everyone was asking about him. That's the way it is now here. Our athletes are tested so much now that there are definitely times I feel sorry for them. They're tested way more than their counterparts abroad."

She's worked for the Sports Council since 1998 and has led the anti-doping arm since 2001. From the chaos that reigned throughout the country's sporting bodies at the turn of the century, order of a sort has settled. A few early resistors apart . . . and those she attributes more to fear of the unknown than anything else . . . each governing body took to the Sports Council's drive for a drug-free sporting landscape without too much hassle. Where in the late-90s, there were plenty of governing bodies whose approach to anti-doping was to have a line in their constitution saying something along the lines of, "We believe in a drug-free sport", there are now structures and guidelines in place for everyone to follow.

Her biggest problem, you sense, isn't the fact that there are athletes who will dope.

Rather, it's that there are vast expanses of the sporting public, not just in Ireland but worldwide, who'll still tune in whether they do or not.

When Ben Johnson said in the wake of Justin Gatlin's positive test last week that people just want to watch athletes run fast and don't care how they manage it, he wasn't expressing anything she didn't take as read. Barry Bonds still gets cheered to the plate at San Francisco Giants home games. Jason Giambi, the New York Yankees player who confessed to using steroids, has just been voted baseball's comeback player of the year while at the same time being revealed to have hired a Mr Universe contestant as his personal trainer. And not a batted eyelid in the house.

"The problem in America is that the public don't particularly care. They're happy enough to watch the athletes so long as they're performing.

They're more than willing to support the people that they no full well are taking the stuff. But it's going to take people coming to serious harm health-wise for that attitude to change. More and more cases are coming to light of deaths that are very closely relating the steroid use. Nobody could seriously have believed that Flo-Jo's death wasn't related to what she'd put into her body during her career. I mean, come on!

It couldn't have jumped out at you more forcefully. She was dead at such a young age after being the fastest woman in the world at a time when those at the very top of the sprinting profession were on drugs as well.

"But people won't see what they don't want to. People will believe what they want to believe. I mean, there are still people in this country who believe Michelle Smith was innocent. You're almost careful bringing it up in conversation with people in case you get the head eaten off you.

Look at that Greatest Irishwoman Ever poll and all the votes she got in it. Incredible.

Changing people's minds is such a hard thing to do. It's hard here and no matter how many cases keep coming to light in America, it's going to be even harder there.

"You hear people making a case for a drugged-up Olympics and a drug-free Olympics and it's just so depressing. I mean, what would be the point of that, first of all? And second, do we really believe that the drugfree Olympics would actually be drug-free? You start thinking a lot about these things when you have kids getting into sport. I have two kids now and one of them is a five-year-old who's a great biker and I look at him and think about what his future is.

What do I want for him? I want him to love sport and I want him to compete. Both my husband and I represented Ireland at mountainbiking and so I know that if, in the future, he ever gets to any level, somewhere along the way he's more than likely going to be faced with drugs.

So the attitude that some people have that says, 'Let's give them all drugs and let them go as fast as they can' really frustrates me."

She takes some heart in recent events. The Balco affair and the travails of Gatlin and Floyd Landis might suggest the beginning of a turned corner, if only for the fact that as Americans . . .

and pre-eminent ones at that . . . there's every chance their tests might have been lost in a safe somewhere in the past.

"It's obviously disappointing for sport when these things come to light, : she says, "especially for the Tour de France when they thought they'd made big strides by removing the people beforehand. For the winner to test positive then is disappointing. But it is only in the last couple of years that the top names have come out when they've failed tests.

In the past, there were times when it's possible they'd have been covered up. But it goes to show that what Wada [World Anti-Doping Agency] are doing and what federations worldwide are doing is beginning to have an impact.

I suppose you have to take some comfort from that."

In the end, it's a long war and the battlegrounds shift every day. Nobody doubts that genetic doping is on the way at some stage but she's confident that Wada have signed up the world experts in the field in order to be a couple of steps ahead of the cheats for once. And if it takes sponsors walking away from big events or an Olympics to be played out in front of empty stadiums to shake sense into sport, then so be it.

"I think we all believe that you can get to the top without drugs but we also believe that it's very damn hard. Plus we accept that there's a high proportion of people at the very top who are somehow managing to get away with it. So it's extremely frustrating. But I think we also believe that we can make a difference."

She has to.