FEWER than one in five of the respondents in our poll think the gardai in the "rape tape" incident should be sacked and prosecuted. The vast majority favour the mildest punishment that was offered to them as an option, which is that the men should be reprimanded and then retrained.

It provides more evidence that the Irish public are well able to distinguish between a genuine scandal and one which has been whipped up and kept going by the media.

More evidence, too -- if any were needed -- that the shrill over-reactions of the National Women's Council are becoming more and more counter-productive by the day. People don't like the toxic tone which its grandstanding director Susan McKay has introduced to debates on gender in this country.

Two words: Lorena Bobbitt. She cut off her husband's little man with a kitchen knife and threw it out of the window of a moving car into a field. As you do. Doctors managed to reattach the runaway organ, but not before giving rise to a million jokes. Like the one about how John Wayne Bobbitt was dating a bulimic because they made a perfect match. She couldn't keep anything down and he couldn't keep anything up.

Does telling that joke imply an inability to empathise with victims of sadistic attacks or eating disorders? Of course not. What happens is you hear about something disturbing, think "ouch" or "yuk" or "eek", then neutralise the discomfort by cracking a joke. That's how jokes work. Nine-tenths of humour is about the darker side of human behaviour. I recently heard a very funny routine from a German comic about the man in Munich who advertised online for a victim that he could kill, dismember and cook. Does that comic believe murdering, cutting up and eating his fellow Germans is intrinsically funny? I'm guessing he doesn't. Nor do I.

He told the jokes and I laughed at them, because they were funny. There's no rhyme or reason to it. I can't justify that response to someone who would never let go long enough to allow themselves to laugh at inappropriate things. You either get it or you don't.

Black humour is a particularly common response amongst people who work in jobs where they have to deal with traumatic situations on a daily basis. Police officers tell an awful lot of dodgy jokes, but since they often spend their shifts cleaning up the after-effects of appalling violence, my inclination is to give them a fairly generous latitude as to what they should and should not say behind closed doors. Whatever gets them through the night.

The guards in the now-infamous 'rape tape' scandal had come from yet another fractious protest by the Shell To Sea campaign. For years down in Mayo, the police have been faced with a phalanx of sinister, unpleasant, aggressive people. The adrenalin rushes. So, back in the car, alone, they started riffing with one another to break the tension.

It's not what you'd call comedy gold, but that doesn't matter, because it wasn't meant for release on DVD. The only reason we heard it was because a video was left accidentally running in the back seat.

Here's the key issue. Does hearing something less than admirable from the lips of an otherwise exemplary individual invalidate what it is about them which commanded respect in the first place? My position would be that it doesn't. A Nobel Peace Prize winner could repeat the joke about the two Palestinian fathers looking at pictures of their suicide-bombing sons and saying wistfully "ah, they blow up so fast these days", and still be a paragon of compassion and sensitivity. It doesn't mean he has no feeling for the victims of terrorism.

Professional hysterics such as the National Women's Council, an organisation which gets shriller and sillier by the day, leapt upon the tape as evidence that the guards are insensitive to rape victims, but it's only proof of something sinister if you've already made up your mind that it is. If that's what you want to think anyway.

Which is why I don't believe a word of it when the various bandwagon-jumpers insist they were shocked/disturbed/horrified /add your own cliche. If anything, they were gleefully delighted at getting something juicy to use against people they regard as their ideological foes.

Fair play to them for that. It was a hell of a coup. But it's not going to change what I think of the guards. I'll judge police officers, those in this instance included, on how they deal with real victims of serious crime, rather than imaginary victims who never existed because they were only the punchline of a joke.

Isn't that the central fact here, after all? Nothing actually happened to anyone. No one got raped. No one was ever in any danger of being raped. You can't get raped by a joke. Nothing untoward was even said to those women.

Susan McKay, director of the National Women's Council, predictably tried to suggest that there was some connection between the tape and the plight of actual rape victims in Mayo. "How are they going to feel about going to the guards when those guards are maybe laughing behind their hands at them or regarding them as being somehow ridiculous or pathetic or dirty?" she demanded to know. To which one can only reply: Yes, it would be reprehensible -- if that was what had happened. But it didn't.

There were no rape victims involved in this incident whatsoever. None. Much less any who were laughed at for being "dirty" or "pathetic". The only rape victims were fictional ones invented to score a point, to ratchet up the outrage, to maximise hostility towards police officers who could be doing a fantastic job for the people of Mayo, for all that any of the denouncers knew or cared, but who had dared to utter a tasteless joke in private.

These periodic witch hunts really do have to stop. It's getting out of hand. First the whispers start on Twitter, then the phone-in shows get involved. Before you know it, the mobs are surging through the streets holding aloft flaming torches and calling for heads to roll. It's so childish and needy. I'm upset, give me a candy bar. Cue attention-seeking foot-stamping. It makes for an atmosphere of timidity and self-censorship, not openness and honesty.

All the more important in that climate for both sides to be heard. As it was, RTE's Miriam O'Callaghan gave McKay a farcically easy time on Prime Time last Tuesday whilst she went off one of her periodic paranoid monologues. O'Callaghan didn't ask McKay to justify a single statement. Not so much as: "Come on, Susan, have you never said something among friends that you'd rather wasn't repeated in public because it wouldn't make you look so saintly?"

Surely we all have if we're honest? When McKay said the men should be suspended pending an inquiry, Miriam still didn't bat an eyelid.

Suspended? For telling a joke? Seriously? If that's the kind of country they want to live in, count me out.

Sunday Independent