The unusual surname doesn't help either. It's not easy to make a household name out of a John Smith or a Mike Burke, but a surname like McElwee is pretty memorable. Put a doctorate in front of it and name recognition is instantaneous.

He is this year's updated version of the miscreants who in past times had their stinking status tattooed on their person or signified by sewing a big scarlet incriminatory letter into their clothing.

Sympathy for his wife and child is deflected by the shrugging sense that he should have thought of them before he did what he did.

The reality is that the level of attention, pursuit and outrage is grossly disproportionate to this individual's crime and only tenuously related to genuine child protection.

Look at the incident itself.

An academic goes on a research trip to Amsterdam. This academic, if we are to judge by published photographs, is not exactly an imposing bruiser who could overcome you in a minute with a chokehold. On the contrary, he's slender, if not fragile.

This wimpish academic gets poleaxed with alcohol on the last night of his overseas trip. In the hotel, he arrives into a room occupied by four girls. He doesn't have to break down the door . . . not that he could . . . because it's not locked. He lurches up to one of the girls, making lewd suggestions as to what she and he might do. She repulses him with some vigour.

He falls on a bed occupied by another girl. The cops get called. A court case follows, as does a fine.

Now, if you were his wife, when he told you about this, you'd want to at least hit him with a 2x4, if not worse. If you were his friend or family, you'd want to tell him he was a bloody fool and should never drink again. If you were an uninvolved non-academic given to cutting to the verbal chase, you'd simply say:

"what a gobshite." But you wouldn't decide that he should be pursued from refuge to refuge like a killer. You wouldn't keep your children out of the back garden, lest he pass by.

Let's face it: no clever, malicious sexual predator picks as a venue for indecent assault a room occupied by three or four vigorous young women. A sexual predator is going to pick a room with one woman in it, and that woman ideally should be asleep, allowing resistance to be quickly and quietly overcome. Entering a room with four girls in it means three girls are going to snap into action if he gets near to damaging the one he has concentrated on. (Indeed, the American girls involved in the incident clearly believed in safety in numbers: they didn't even lock their door. ) This man's moronic nocturnal visitation was so inept that he didn't even get convicted of indecent assault. He got convicted of attempted indecent assault.

Now, how did an incompetent attempt at groping a strange girl in a hotel bedroom and talking dirty to her turn this academic into a real and present danger to children everywhere? If every Irishman who got drunk as a skunk and propositioned a teenage girl was publicly disgraced, regarded as a threat to much younger children, forced to resign his job, rendered unemployable and subjected to media pursuit, this country would grind to a halt.

Anyway, in his day job, the amount of contact this guy had with children was somewhere between little and none. He wasn't running a playgroup. His interaction was with third-level students and colleagues studying children and child protection. Nobody seems to be suggesting that he did anything bad to children in the two shadowed years of work he got by not telling his employers about his conviction . . . and, since former colleagues are doing finger-next-the-nose nudgery to every passing journalist, you'd figure any such behaviour would have been outed by now if it had happened.

So who promoted this guy to Ireland's Summer Villain and why? One theory is that he had it coming because he climbed the academic ladder too far, too fast, provoking envy among colleagues who perceived themselves to be more worthy.

Another theory says he's just a tool in a wider conspiracy to "get" a highly placed figure in the HSE who knew about the conviction but did nothing about it.

Whatever the reason for the outrageinflation, its connection with real protection of real children is tenuous, and the amount of attention devoted to an eejit distracts from the reality that children are abused every day in this country, usually by family members and close friends. Not by academics who disgrace themselves and confess to only two of the three bodies requiring confession.

Caricaturing the perpetrator of a once-off drunken grope as a national threat permits lip-smacking sensationalism in the name of child protection. It allows for a lot of rigour and righteousness.

And not a lot of mercy.

Shane Coleman returns next week