Rather than treat the story as a terrible human tragedy, some newspapers covered it as they might a storyline from Coronation Street that had been leaked to them by a producer trying to boost ratings. Others decided that the woman's husband, who had been involved in the killing of John Carthy in Abbeylara some years ago, was fair game for some attention. Although the garda had been absolved of any wrongdoing in the Barr report, which was otherwise scathing about the handling of the siege by the force, some newspapers thought that the connection between the death of his wife and child and his shooting of John Carthy was worth noting. They duly noted it.

I've written about the Abbeylara shooting on many occasions and about the performance of the unit of An Garda S�och�na of which the officer under discussion is a member. The siege was a failure from the point of view of the guards; they badly planned their response and badly executed (no pun intended) their plan. Several very bad decisions were made that day, and they culminated in Carthy's death. He paid with his life, but so far no guard involved has been disciplined or censured in any way. Until Judge Robert Barr suggested that this wasn't the greatest garda operation ever implemented, several people at the top level of the force seem to have thought that their members had done very well that day.

The problem, I think, that some people have had with the coverage of the tragedy last week was that by making a connection between the public actions of the garda involved and the private disaster that had befallen him, the papers involved seemed to be implying that in some way he deserved his misfortune. What goes around comes around; you take a life, you lose a life. Because people were genuinely puzzled at the significance given to what they thought was an irrelevant detail about an individual guard, they thought that the newspapers involved must have been hinting at a kind of karmic involvement in the death of his wife. Hence the outrage.

Anybody with the proverbial half a brain, anybody paying even the slightest attention to the way the Irish media works, would know that this was nonsense, however. One of the papers involved, the Sunday Independent, has acted as a mouthpiece for An Garda S�och�na in some of its worst moments in recent years (Abbeylara included); the idea that it would trash a member of the force in such a way is inconceiveable.

Much more likely is a scenario whereby, like everybody else, they knew the identity of the garda involved and thought it would make a neat headline. For sure, it was an insensitive, careless and disrespectful thing to do, but does it really deserve some of the reaction it has sparked off, which ranges from hysterical to hypocritical?

We'll deal with the hysteria first.

Much of the outrage expressed by people who are not members of An Garda S�och�na was vented on Liveline last Monday afternoon.

(For the most part, readers of newspapers have not been moved to put pen to paper. ) In recent years, Liveline has become a safe and monitored social outlet for people who might otherwise be out shooting up shopping malls; the opinions expressed thereon by no means represent the views of the public at large who are, generally speaking, too busy living their lives to be ringing up radio stations. So, yes, there is some public unease about what happened, but not anywhere near what you might think if you were listening to the radio on Monday.

For the hypocritical response, we need turn no further than to the coterie of individuals which runs the Garda Representative Association. On Thursday, the GRA wrote to every garda station in the country asking all its members and their families not to buy three named newspapers. They have also suggested that ordinary members of the public boycott these newspapers and "demonstrate their outrage at the insensitive and deplorable" coverage of the deaths of the mother and child.

A GRA statement also condemned the media coverage of an accident in Lucan a few weeks ago in which 24-year-old Derek O'Toole died after being hit by a car driven by a garda.

Following that incident, the full details of which are still a mystery (to say the very least of it), a number of media outlets, presumably acting on leaks from people that the GRA purports to represent, reported that Derek O'Toole was known to garda�. He wasn't, of course, instead being an excellent example of how human beings conquer the adversity that life places in front of them. (He suffered leukaemia twice as a child. ) The GRA did not want to condemn that element of the newspaper coverage, however; instead it focused on the naming in some newspapers last weekend of the garda who drove the car into Derek O'Toole.

To say that this is the most blatant example of hypocritical codswallop is to risk being accused of understatement. Members of the Garda Representative Association have been leaking names and confidential information to journalists for years, without a peep of protest from the GRA officer board, which squealed only when Michael McDowell threatened (briefly) to try and outlaw the practice.

What the response of the GRA to last weekend's newspaper stories suggests is that it is happy enough when ordinary members of the public are having their reputations trashed by leaky garda� but affects outrage when some of its own members are done down by those same leakers.

So yes, the GRA is entitled to be upset by last Sunday's papers, but we could all take its outrage a little more seriously if, instead of coming after the media, it got its own house in order first.