How shocking! How amazing! How frightful! How incredible! A dark and terrible day for the force! A stain on Irish life! Et cetera! Et cetera! Et cetera!
Any observers who were surprised by the findings of the Morris report must have been living somewhere on the Yellow Brick Road. They clearly thought this was a law-abiding country, where politicians are upright citizens, and where the police force consists of laughing, jolly constables.
But why on earth should a country's police force be expected to be conspicuously better than the society from which it is drawn? How did people come to believe that a polity which had electively adorned itself with the likes of Charles Haughey, Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Sean Doherty, Michael Lowry, Beverley Flynn, not to speak of the loathsome Lorcan Allen, should spontaneously generate a police force of almost Scandinavian virtue? Societies get good police only if there is a political will to ensure that this happens. And there has never been that will in this country. The wonder is not that so much corruption has been found in Donegal, but that it is so relatively limited in scope. No matter. Perhaps Morris II might remedy that lamentable deficiency. Tighten seat-belts: this will, we're told (no doubt complete with full frontal nudity and explicit sexual scenes) be even stronger.
Within a democracy, people get the police they deserve. Heaven and history provided us with the moral opportunity to create an efficient, dedicated police service over the past thirty years: and we spurned it, with all the elusiveness of an eel sliding into a mudbank. This was the vital test as to whether or not we have the stomach and the courage to devise a modern, honest police force. So we knew long before Morris I that we had not.
The litany of policing failure is simply grotesque. The motorbike, the cigarette-ends and the clothing of the IRA terrorists, lying in a firing position in Co Louth, who massacred 18 British soldiers at Narrow Water in 1979, and which could have provided forensic evidence against them, simply vanished from Dundalk Garda station. No career was damaged by this, nor was there a major investigation into it. Indeed, Garret FitzGerald's government seemed more intent on denying the truth - that the bomb was detonated from the Republic - than it was in convicting the killers, who were merely charged with motoring offences, and went on to murder many times over.
Dundalk was not unique. It set a pattern, which has been repeated ever since. Only the other day, Garda Sgt White of Ballybofey claimed in a court action that the State had acknowledged that it had mislaid 15 of the 28 audio tapes seized in a Garda raid on his home.
The sergeant had been accused of planting a shotgun on a Traveller encampment. Moreover, the shotgun and cartridge, and the bag they had been concealed in, had also gone missing. Accordingly, the High Court has blocked the prosecution of Sgt White pending a further hearing.
The repeated loss of evidence is not the only endemic vice of the force. How is it remotely possible that after decades of kidnapping, from the Donoughmores to Don Tidey, we still did not have a highly trained kidnap/hostage Garda team? Thus we had the almost inevitable tragedy of Abbeylara. Almost worse than this was the absence of any political outcry over the failure to provide an anti-terrorist policing service which we would unquestionably need.
And after we learnt that the senior Garda officer leading the raid on Judge Brian Curtin's home didn't even know how long a search warrant was valid for, nothing about the force should really surprise us.
Structurally, and culturally, An Garda Síochána faithfully reflects the values of the dishonest and sleeveenish society it polices.
This is a society where corruption is written into the rule-book. It is one which elects corrupt politicians simply because they are corrupt, and then spends hundreds of millions on lawyers (who set their own wickedly high fees) to investigate that corruption.
It is a society which, politically speaking, stood idly by while lawyers revelled in a diseased casuistry to set terrorists exultantly free. It is one where publicans charge several times as much for soft drinks as they do for beers, even in the midst of a national crisis caused by alcohol abuse.
It is one in which GPs refuse to give repeat-prescriptions to the long-term ill, who must then pay for repeat-visits to get fresh prescriptions. It is one in which auctioneers pay themselves a percentage of the cost of a land-deal, not by the work they have put into it.
It is one in which TDs and senators claim vast amounts in unvouched travel expenses, and flagrantly abuse State-subsidised Dáil postal services. It is one in which banks aid in the defrauding of the Exchequer, even as they overcharge their customers.
So who can truly be astonished at the corruption which surfaces in An Garda Síochána? Or by the expectation in the force that you are a failure if your income from outside sources doesn't exceed your Garda pay by the time you are forty?
Or by the Dublin garda who took 60 days' sick-leave off last year, and whose primary income is from videoing weddings?
Or by that wretched shower, the GRA, with its contemptible blue flus?
No. The only thing to be surprised by is the number of dedicated men and women who still want to be honest police officers, and who daily risk their lives in the public service.
We should, by God, be grateful for them, at least.