There is a scene in one of those old Police Squad movies in which one of said squad inadvertently sets a firework warehouse alight and every variety of Catherine wheel, sky rocket and roman candle lights up the night sky as the edifice combusts magnificently. The punchline is the policeman on the side-street ushering the sightseers along: "Move along now folks, nothing to see here, move along, nothing to see . . ."

I'm sure the policeman was played by Noel Murphy of the IRFU.

Neil Francis may have inadvertently set the pyrotechnics popping last week, but it didn't take a Woodward or a Bernstein, let alone the two of them, to figure that, of all team games, rugby and gridiron are the most perfectly suited to the needs of the anabolic steroid market. The Tribune story was comparable to a vague allegation that somebody, somewhere in the rock music industry is - gasp - using recreational drugs.

Yet it was significant that somebody within the sport said the things that Francis said. More with his maverick instincts would serve the game well. Francis has done his sport no harm at all.

What has turned the whole thing into such a show-biz spectacular is the performance of Frank Drebben and the boys down at IRFU HQ who are serving (who would have thought it?) the needs of their friends ahead of the needs of their sport.

The basic duty owed to audience, sponsors and clean players in the matter of policing the sports world for cheats is that of transparency. The IRFU have left us with a situation whereby three players have apparently tested positive this year. The organisation, so keen for names to be named last Monday, has not named them, but drawn from up its sleeve the trump card of a "confidentiality clause". Worse, their cases are to be considered by a so-called independent tribunal which deliberates in secret and merely announces that Player X has been cleared to play on.

We are sure that the members of the independent tribunal are solid oaks, fine citizens and inscrutably independent. They deserve, then, not to be asked to participate in a secretive process which suggests cover-up at every turn.

In the business of educating other players and the public, shouldn't we be told why this decision was taken, what medical analysis was taken into account, whether longitudinal profiling of the players samples has been ordered or has taken place? Don't the other 30 or so players who are in the frame for having beaten the rap in one of the current cases deserve for these proceedings to be opened up to the public?

The IRFU, for patiently nurturing the ambience of clubbiness which pervades the sport, is culpable in the present embarrassing circumstance, and the spectacle of men in suits digging themselves into an ever greater hole this week will, we hope, be salutary to other sports.

We hope. Sports in Ireland are always going to get caught in embarrassing situations while the Government fails in its duty to recognise sport as a recreational asset with an ethical imperative that is worth policing and protecting.

When Dr Jim McDaid became Minister for Sport some time back, he arrived with sirens flashing and klaxons blaring. He talked a good game on the issue of drugs and spoke big about blood-testing and the desirability of Ireland having its own, world-class laboratory. We all nodded our heads in assent. Something was going to be done at last.

We are quite a distance down the road from those heady days. The situation gets ever more critical, Irish sport ever more debased. The Government is no nearer to implementing either the EU Directive on Drugs or the Council of Europe's guidelines.

The squabble between successive Ministers for the Sport and the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) is too detailed and ugly to chronicle here, but a consequence of it has been a giant loophole in the policing procedures for sport in Ireland.

In 1994, two years before the Olympic Games in Atlanta, the OCI reckoned it had drug-tested 50 per cent of the athletes likely to be representing the country at the Games. Sure, the tests were the urine tests, which have limited scope, but at least they were in place and the possibility of being tested served as a deterrent.

This week, at a similar stage of the cycle which will bring us to Sydney 2000, no Irish athlete has been tested. None of the Irish athletes who went to the Junior Olympics in Moscow this summer had been tested. None of those who go off for the European Juniors in Denmark next summer will have been tested.

The Government has stripped the OCI of its funding, including the medical budget designed for testing athletes. Nothing has been set up in its stead.

There is no doubt that Government involvement in the business of drug-testing is desirable and necessary, and, should they eventually happen, Dr Jim McDaid's plans for the New Year should be backed up by significant legislative weight and a programme to educate children about the long-lost ethics of sport.

Just take perhaps the biggest sports story of the Irish weekend, the performance of Mark Scanlon in winning the world junior cycling championship on the occasion of his 18th birthday. We believe in Mark Scanlon; we don't believe in his sport. We stopped believing in it a long time before gendarmes began hauling cyclists out of their beds this summer.

So what's the story for Mark Scanlon on the cusp of a great career doing something he loves? What can he parlay his talent into?

Indeed, what might he turn his body into? Look at the snapshots of him, young and fecklessly grinning on the podium on Saturday. In 10 years, will he be sleeping every night with a heart monitor strapped to himself, a device which will wake him when his blood thickens and begins flowing more slowly so that he can hop on an exercise bike for half an hour and get it going again?

Will he be dead by 38, like Flo Jo? Or before 38, like 18 cyclists in the past decade?

If cycling had gone on covering up and plastering over the cracks, that could well have been his fate. Luckily for Mark Scanlon, brave people have taken some big steps. More importantly, the French government has been willing to place the value of sport above the value of public relations for its country and send policemen in to dismantle the Tour de France.

A government well-informed of the needs for ethics in sport has built those needs into law. Cycling may in the end be saved, not by itself, but by municipal recognition that sport must have its statutory safeguards.

Meanwhile, in Ireland we sit and wait. A man called Noisy gags himself under rugby's official secrets act. And we send out another generation of athletes with a wink that says we don't give a damn how they bring back the bacon.