Pay attention, peasants! Sit up! Take notice of me.

Supreme Court judge Adrian Hardiman came out to play last week. The judge is peeved. The media is not paying him sufficient attention. His work is not being minutely analysed, as it would be if he were sitting on the US Supreme Court.

His contribution to modern jurisprudence is going unremarked on. The cowgirls who cover the workings of the courts are not up to the job. Everybody wants to talk to Joe rather than listen to me. Will somebody please listen to me?

Hardiman gave a speech outlining his concerns at the Law Society's Justice Media Awards. He decried the lengths to which he goes in writing judgements to illustrate that the administration of justice was a "logical, rigorous, developing and humane" one, only to find that his ruminations were not being reported. He looked with "envy" at the "highly professional and specialised press corps" attached to the US Supreme Court, who were generally qualified lawyers. Presumably, these longings occurred to him as he sashayed in his robes through the Four Courts, a tipstaff walking before him with a big stick, parting the sea of commoners.

"In the same way, science is covered by an academic scientist and sports, not excluding dog racing and computer games, by highly competent people," he said. And poor old Mr Justice is left with numbskulls reporting on his contribution to the development of modern Ireland.

The judge requires a few pointers about the real world. In the first instance, writing detailed judgements is part of the job for which he is extremely well paid. We have long passed the day where rulings can be handed down like tablets from on high without any explanations. If the subject matter of a ruling falls within the narrow focus of today's media, and if it is written in presentable English, it might well get a run out. That was the case with Hardiman's excellent judgement last year on the treatment by the state of the wrongly imprisoned Frank Shortt.

Otherwise, it's there for lawyers, parliamentary draftspeople, and various obsessives to pore over. The reason for such neglect is that the great unwashed are too busy to examine the detail.

And that is the kernel of Hardiman's pain. The media is a function of culture, which now requires its news in soundbites and easily digestible portions. The public don't have the patience or time to read over and ponder the minute implications of a Supreme Court ruling.

Whether this culture is being led by the media, or whether the media is merely feeding off it, is open to debate. Such musings might well be directed at media owners and executives, rather than having a cheap cut at reporters.

Equally, few media organisations can justify hiring specialised staff to cover the Supreme Court. It may have gone unnoticed by Mr Justice Hardiman, but the US is a country of 250 million people, and a corresponding market. In any event, while I have the utmost confidence in the Justice's extraordinary ability, would he have made it to the bench of the US Supreme Court himself, in such a bigger pool? Having dealt with his own issues of neglect, Mr Justice Hardiman then moved onto charging female reporters with incompetence. He did this by first suggesting that he wanted to be friends with them. He quoted a line from a song in the musical Oklahoma: "the farmer and the cowman should be friends".

From there, he leapt to accusing "cowgirls" of inaccurate coverage of cases and judgements, but maybe that's what friends are for. (None of this element of his address was included in a script forwarded from his office last Wednesday, after the story had broken in The Irish Times) To suggest that the media and the judiciary should be mates implies the judge knows little about the function of the media. Every liberal democratic model requires that tension exists between the fourth estate and the three which form the government.

The workings of the media also appear to be beyond the judge's grasp. The media machine is a beast which requires 24-hour feeding. The largely female press corps in the Four Courts work under extreme pressure and on the whole do a good job.

They fret over every line that is pumped into the machine on an hourly basis, lest a stray word is pounced on by a trial lawyer or judge. And they work for a small fraction of the wages garnered by the main performers in the courtroom.

Perhaps My Lord is suffering from his confinement to the dusty environs of the Supreme Court, far from trials, the madding crowd or the gaze of the media. In that vein, I would beseech my fellow hacks to please, please pay more attention to Mr Justice Hardiman's every written word and utterance.

The only charge that the learned gent didn't level at the media is the old one that the fourth estate is quick to criticise, but highly sensitive to criticism of its own workings. This, of course, is an outrageous slur, unfounded, totally unwarranted, unbelievable and unworthy of response.