Senior gardai have conceded that the image of their force portrayed in the media over the past week has probably been the worst in its history but, as one said yesterday, the media and the public appear to have ignored the fact that the force has probably never been more efficient.
They point to a list of successes including the Special Branch's interception of major bomb attacks by dissident republican terrorists opposed to the Northern talks.
One of the huge bombs it found was to be detonated in the North while the Sinn Fein leader, Mr Gerry Adams, was on a critical St Patrick's Day visit to meet President Clinton. Another was about to be shipped by ferry to England to be exploded in the days before the Good Friday deadline for the Belfast Agreement.
In recent years, the Garda regenerated its anti-crime activities with remarkable results. The campaign against organised crime which stemmed from the investigation into the murder of the journalist Veronica Guerin has wrecked the operations of the biggest criminals the State has produced.
The National Drugs Unit has seized tens of millions of pounds worth of drugs and arrested dozens of major traffickers. Proceeds of crime are being seized and handed to the Exchequer in equally successful operations by the Criminal Assets Bureau and National Bureau of Fraud Investigation.
The Republic has probably one of the lowest homicide rates of any country other than micronations. The Garda has probably the highest conviction rate in relation to homicide - about 95 per cent of murders are solved.
Crime rates, once a source of near-hysteria in the media, have been falling sharply, and conviction and detection rates have reached the point where the State is unable to provide enough prison space for the convicted offenders.
All this has been achieved by a force which is largely unarmed and is accepted by the community which it polices.
It is a record which any police force would envy but, senior sources conceded this week, its image has been severely tarnished in the past two weeks. One of the main sources of the current damage has been the disastrous industrial relations problems arising over the main staff associations' pay negotiations.
Four years ago the two main unions, the Garda Representative Association and Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, accepted what now seems an extraordinarily bad pay deal. The deal, agreed at the outset of the PCW pay round, gave gardai no basic pay increase but provided that the regular allowances which make up a substantial part of the pay of most gardai be included as part of their pensionable salary.
This was an attractive deal for older officers but disastrous for the younger urban-based gardai with mortgages and young families. A section of the GRA took its negotiators to the High Court in an attempt to stop the deal.
They failed and later broke away to form their own union, the Garda Federation. A succession of embarrassments followed, culminating in the GRA hiring a private security firm to provide "protection" for its conference in Galway in 1996 from an imagined threat of disruption from the federation.
Last year following prolonged mediation, the federation agreed to dissolve itself and rejoin the GRA after agreement was reached with the Government to reopen the PCW pay talks. The reconstituted GRA went back into talks just before the December 31st deadline.
The GRA's opening gambit was, as the Taoiseach said earlier this week, for a 39 per cent increase. However, sources close to the GRA leadership say Mr Ahern's remarks were unfair in that both the official side and the association knew it would settle for much less, probably about 12 per cent.
The GRA's main negotiators wanted to stay in talks when the official side offered 7 per cent two weeks ago, but a group on its central executive committee vetoed this, and the April 22nd march to the Dail and the 24-hour strike went ahead.
The levels of support for both protests seemed to surprise the Government and even some of the staff representatives who may have underestimated the anger over pay levels and the fact that they had missed out on the more substantial PCW awards to nurses, teachers and prison officers.
While these internal difficulties escalated, Garda management and the Department of Justice seemed unable to limit the damage and appeared to have made errors of judgment in their industrial relations dealings. The consequences go beyond yesterday's action.
The force is undergoing a major examination by consultants appointed by former Taoiseach Mr John Bruton, who wanted a "root and branch" reform. This was resented by senior officers who saw it as an unwarranted intrusion. The staff unions, who were not properly drawn into the process and were angry about pay, immediately adopted a stance of opposing all productivity proposals.
(Attempts to introduce productivity procedures under a previous management plan - the Garda Siochana Corporate Strategy Policy Document 1993-1997 - had already collapsed.)
Senior officers say there is a need for new procedures to improve efficiency. Management would like to close about half the 24-hour stations in Dublin so that staff on night shifts can be deployed to working days when crime rates are much higher.
The procedure of having a garda appear in the District Court for every remand hearing is a relic of a bygone era. Every working day in Dublin, the District Courts are packed with officers waiting for hours for people they have arrested to make brief appearances. These appearances are massively wasteful but popular with gardai who often get overtime when they have to attend outside their normal shifts.
Much of the force has not entered the computer age, and there are large gaps in its information and communication systems. For instance, there is no means of sending computerised images of robbers captured on security videos around stations in Dublin.
Garda management says there is a pressing need for reform, but acknowledges that none is possible so long as the pay dispute continues. Some also expressed concern that it might be difficult to introduce any productivity procedures if the rank-and-file is not happy with whatever settlement emerges.
It was also noted that a large percentage of gardai ignored the plea from the Commissioner, Mr Patrick Byrne, to go to work. Garda management's worst fear is that if there is no satisfactory resolution, the whole notion of "control" in the force - where an officer must obey an order from a superior - might have been lost.