A PICTURE starts a thousand arguments. On September 6th, one picture published by Ireland's two largest national dailies did just that both carried a photograph of a dead man on the front page.

The man was pictured as he lay in his car, having been shot dead a short time before. It later emerged that he had recently completed a prison sentence for manslaughter, a sentence given for his part in the.a death of his wife.

While much reaction to the publishing of this picture has been critical, there have been many attempts to justify it.

These usually come down to a version of an argument that however shocked some people might be by this image, greater good will come of its public display.

It will help the fight against crime, we are told, by showing us, starkly and without the cosmetic effect of the funeral home, its more dreadful consequences.

Some have tried to build on this argument by invoking examples from further afield. The Irish Times editorial of September 7th referred to the good achieved by publishing photographs of starving Biafran children in the 1960s.

Surprising though it may be to the leader writer, Africans will often not respond with gratitude for the good achieved by photographs of their starving sisters and brothers.

They will more likely ask why editors go for the short, sharp shock - usually featuring an enfeebled African - rather than try to learn for themselves and then inform their readership about the causes of famine. They may even suggest that it is only when editors do this that they can claim to be part of the solution.

I would be more comfortable if editors simply said they published the photograph of Michael Brady because to do otherwise might wipe out their sales in terms of the opposition.

It is their pretence of virtue which is most problematic. That it is pretence becomes more obvious when we examine the type of image most frequently used to achieve the good effect. We have unnamed starving Biafrans - and Ethiopians and Somalis - dying in front of our electronic eyes.

We have unnamed pubescent Vietnamese girls screaming in napalm induced agony as they run through village streets.

WHY DON'T we have photographs of coronary fatalities with a history of smoking, taken in their last agony, to convince us of the ills of tobacco addiction? What about a close up of the bruised and torn genitalia of a rape victim to underline the horror? And surely a picture of the alcohol affected victims of a fatal car accident in situ would make a point about drinking and driving?

Part of the answer is contained in the way that we think and speak about crime. Crime has adopted a rhetorical function in Irish society whereby almost anything can be excused by claiming that "it will help the fight against crime".

The image of Michael Brady and its attendant justifications is of a piece with an all too common "hang them and flog them" language. The "them" is instructive crime is done by them to us. Unlike heart attacks, rapes and car accidents, crime is uniquely theirs. Our only relationship with it is as innocent victims.

This is what makes it legitimate to publish photographs of "them" on our front pages, photographs which would be unthinkable if they were of us in similar circumstances. What all of this serves to obscure is that crime is committed by people - people like us - with whom we have a 101 relationships.

If the crime problem is to be overcome, then that solution will have to be people based. It will not be solved by bricks and mortar, much less by photographs.

Several people have already argued that to publish such a photograph is to deny respect to a dead man and his family and friends. I would go further and say that it also shows no respect to the reader. When an image like this is set on the printed page, the reader's capacity for empathy is set at nil; there is no space left for it to work.

Far from heightening awareness, this sensationalism leads to a general deadening of sensibility. Next time, a simple murder story will find it much harder to hook us in without an accompanying visual. With this deadening comes a forgetfulness. Now we can all remember Michael Brady's name. First impressions last, but if a sequence of such photographs were to be published, I'd lay long odds against anyone remembering numbers four to 10.

The real damage done by such a photograph is that it robs people of something intimate and precious. Surely everyone who saw that photograph has their own memory of the first instant of looking at the corpse of someone they loved. In that instant is contained something that is uniquely and irreducibly mine. If I am forced to share that moment with the general public, I am robbed, literally, of my private life. I will find it hard not to feel that my dignity as a person is diminished.

IN ALL the rhetoric about crime in Ireland, it is not so often mentioned that crime is against people; every crime is ultimately a crime against humanity and no crime is totally reducible to terms of property and finance.

While newspaper editors will claim to be against the increase in crime - who isn't? - and may invoke their role in that struggle to justify publishing photographs of a dead man on the front page, it is perversely ironic that such a decision is itself demeaning of human dignity - which is the ultimate argument against crime of all kinds.

It seems to me that if we want to fight crime effectively, then we must avoid training our most powerful weapon on ourselves. It is people who are hurt and humiliated by crime.

It is this hurt and humiliation which is the basis of our most powerful moral arguments against the criminal.

Consequently, it is hard to escape the conclusion that when one demeans human dignity by offering a contemporary version of the decapitated heads on the walls of Dublin Castle, one behaves in a criminal like fashion oneself. It certainly undermines one's credibility as a leader in the fight against crime.