Not a good week for the Police?

News emerges that the Irish police have had to make a rather embarrassing u turn over the young girl taken from a Roma couple. Having placed the young girl in to care because she was reported as having blonde hair and blue eyes (as opposed to her purported parents), DNA tests have now showed that she is indeed their daughter. Well, fancy that!

The real issue here of course is one of xenophobia. Had the girl been living in a middle class Dublin family, I don't imagine for one minute the same steps would have been taken. In the same week as the Andrew Mitchell trial in London, this is turning out to be a week to forget for the police. They have shown themselves to be anything but unbiased and will not emerge from any of these incidents with great credit.

The obvious political angle in the Andrew Mitchell case is the more worrying in that it seriously undermines their impartiality. When their own chief officer refuses to acknowledge their shortcomings, you start to think that the power has gone to their head. They clearly don't feel remotely accountable to anybody and, on that basis, we should all be very worried.

At the centre of the Andrew Mitchell story is the word Pleb. It is the shortened version of the word Plebian and originates from Ancient Rome. It referred to the ordinary, common classes of people in Roman society. They were a good mixture of skilled and unskilled people and would have been shopkeepers, craftsmen and the like. I wonder how many of the officers on duty at Downing Street that day would have known what it actually meant? I don't mean to doubt their intelligence because they have clearly made the story up anyway. If they hadn't though, they should know that far from being a derogatory word, pleb actually referes to the mainstays of our society despite our modern world tending to misconstrue its real meaning.

But back to the Irish Police. Will they return the poor girl with apology and magnanimity or will they give the time served police cop out, "we were just doing our job". Heaven help us but we all know it will be the latter...