Irish photographers don't see themselves as the fierce beasts that hunt celebrities in the same way as their counterparts in the UK. In fact, the best known media photographers deny that we even have paparazzi.

Veteran Irish photographer Pat Maxwell published a book last year entitled Stories Behind My News Pictures. Through his lifetime of photography, Maxwell has photographed everyone from Brendan Behan, Jackie Kennedy and the Beatles, to Bing Crosby and John Wayne in Ireland. These days, he generally works "by appointment" in the studio but nevertheless he's one of Irish newspaper photography's biggest names.

"I don't think we have any Irish paparazzi in the same way that they have in the UK, " says Maxwell. "Irish photographers are more inclined to be more mannerly towards the celebrity. We ask people if they would mind posing for a photograph and if they refuse we respect their wishes. The type of photography I do now is on commission so I am never in the position where I am chasing somebody for a photograph."

Renowned Irish photographer Charlie Collins says, "We don't really do paparazzi-type photographs here in Ireland.

"If an international celebrity is coming into Dublin airport we might get a call to take a picture of them and that is usually quite easy as you know when their flights and arrival times are so you just go to the airport and take the picture.

"The last one of these pictures our agency got was one of Pete Doherty and Kate Moss arriving in Ireland a few weeks ago."

One of Collins's most high-profile and bestknown photographs was his picture of Bishop Eamon Casey taken in Mexico after Casey left Ireland amidst the scandal that he had fathered a child. "We had to trace him and it took months' and months' work. After we found out what continent he was in, we had to find out what country he was in and then what part of Mexico he was in - and we eventually got the photograph of him. It took a lot of good detective work.

"More recently one of our photographers, Colin Keegan, has got pictures of Willie O'Dea holding the gun and the picture of Bertie Ahern standing wearing wellingtons in the floods in Drumcondra a few years ago."

Unlike in the UK, not all Irish celebrities have an acrimonious relationship with the paparazzi. Last year Sinead O'Connor announced on the Late Late Show that she was coming out of retirement to re-launch her music career. A horde of Irish photographers gathered outside RT�? buildings to get a snap of her after the show and they were shocked that O'Connor posed individually for each of them and even borrowed a camera so she could jokingly take a picture of the hunting pack.