"You, " he said aggressively. "Can you read?"

I was so nervous I said yes, as if that's what he was asking me. But he was being sarcastic.

Had I not been able to read the sign that said "no overtaking"?

Etcetera. Etcetera.

Afterwards, I was trying to get over him by thinking about the dangers and challenges the gardai face in their daily lives. I thought, as I often do, of how they attend terrible death scenes, how they have to break the news of death to people, how they have to confront criminals who would kill them, how they, not me, get called to the Abbeylaras.

They encounter so many more violent people than the rest of us that maybe it's wise of them to establish dominance by gross rudeness, even before they find out what kind of person they're dealing with. But the fact is that ninetysomething percent of people are like me, and hardly do anything wrong in their whole lives. Ninetysomething percent of a garda's interaction with the public is perfectly peacable.

Why, then, the macho posturing? Why the swagger?

There's talk now of garda reform, due to the coming-together of the report of the Abbeylara inquiry, the Morris inquiry, the Dean Lyons inquiry and the happy accident that the present minister for justice is not in hock to the interest groups that have muted such reforming zeal as ministers from the big parties ever felt inclined to display. But if there is to be important reform, I think it should be with ordinary things, not exceptional things, that it should begin.

In Abbeylara, a young man was shot dead by gardai in an incompetent siege operation. A siege, it's fair to say, is an exceptional happening . . . not that that excuses the unkindness and lack of intelligence with which John Carthy was treated.

But what wasn't exceptional was the back story of hassle between this nervy, volatile, vulnerable young man and some local gardai. A piece of nonsense about a burnt football mascot . . . a wooden goat . . . and 'cheek' given by John Carthy resulted in his being taken into the station where something happened that he, certainly, considered was abuse.

No one ever thought that his belief that he had been humiliated and threatened would be publicised. But now that it has, it might prompt reformers in a certain direction. We don't want to arrive at the situation, common in cities but completely unnecessary in rural Ireland, where the cops are routinely hated by young men and young men are as routinely bullied by the cops. Gardai have too much power to allow themselves to be easily provoked.

What lay person wants to come up against the hostility of even one garda, given that power?

Who would want, called into the station . . . that is, on their turf . . . to come up against the hostility of two or three bored gardai acting together?

In Donegal, there seem to have been so many gardai doing so many wrong and crazy things that I haven't even quite followed the plot. Are these Morris-inquiry gardai the same ones who were involved with a Ms McGlinchy and something to do with a coffee-grinder and explosives? Or was that a different lot? How many bad apples can one barrel have?

But Donegal doesn't frighten me in the same way as a case reported recently, where a woman won considerable damages for an incident involving a garda and her car. She was apparently an exemplary car-owner whose car had just passed its NCT and was taxed and insured for herself and her partner. But when, one morning, her partner parked it in a wrong place, a passing garda declared the car impounded. The partner rang the young woman on his mobile to bring the insurance details and their licences from home, but before she could arrive the garda, becoming impatient, had jumped into the car, and driven off around the corner, apparently at speed, and had crashed the car. Whereupon he asserted that the car had been defective . . . that that was why it crashed.

The court awarded over 30,000 . . . if memory serves me right . . . to the young woman. Fair enough. But what I'd like to know is: what, if anything, of a disciplinary nature, happened to that cop? Because it is unlikely that most of us will ever be in the way of having a shotgun planted on us or could ever be plausibly set up as explosives users. But we can all fear the arrogance that grows on young pups when they're wearing uniform. None of us want to live in a society where a cop who feels like giving someone a hard time is pretty sure he can get away with it.

But the reason why the police should be trained quite specifically in civility is not so that they'll be polite to you and me. The reason is that there's a continuum of behaviour that stretches from civility to probity. Self-restraint is an intellectual stance as well as a tactic. It is about keeping a distance, and gardai should keep at a distance. After all, if a garda humiliates some young fellow because he's a pain in the neck, or if a garda drives someone's car away basically to show that he's cock of the walk, and nothing happens to him as a consequence, he won't go back to being nice. There are lots of things a bad garda can do . . . as Donegal has shown . . . and what will that garda do next?