The Sunday Independent editor, Aengus Fanning, turned up on RTE on Wednesday morning with the forbearance of a man stung by something strange and virulent. He was there apparently to reiterate the apology delivered on Tuesday evening - an apology which, as Pat Kenny put it, had "taken a while" to appear.

This, explained Mr Fanning, was because it had taken "probably 24 hours" to realise "the extent of outrage and sense of offence" caused by Mary Ellen Synon's article. By that reckoning, it must have been some time on Monday morning when he grasped the gravity of the situation.

Yet, at around noon that same day, he felt able to dash off an unapologetic statement, pronouncing on the importance of a free press to democracy; the paper's conviction that no columnist should be censored, and offering only "the right of reply next Sunday to those who may have been offended."

So what happened to change his attitude so radically between Monday lunchtime and Tuesday evening? Clearly not the language or arguments used in the article, because he had surely read it before issuing Monday's breezy statement. Presumably, too, he had heard - or heard something of - Miss Synon's interview on Today FM's Sunday Supplement programme (see panel).

The fact that Mr Fanning was nonetheless surprised by the intensity of public distress suggests that he himself had perceived nothing untoward in the article, beyond the usual cut and thrust.

So was it - to use his own words - the "quite unusual, if not unprecedented" reaction of the public? So he said at the outset until, in a surreal feat of role reversal, he launched an attack on Joe Duffy of RTE's Liveline, accusing him and his ilk of cranking up "the public emotion" (a tactic last seen during the O'Flaherty furore).

But Miss Synon, as early as Sunday morning, in her only interview on the issue (and in which, strangely, she omitted to repeat the term "cripples") had already done a fair job of that herself, in an item introduced by Sam Smyth as one that was "clearly raising temperatures already".

So might it have been commercial considerations or fear of prosecution? "Not true", said Mr Fanning, "Those were not a factor." Nonetheless, it is a strange accountant who wouldn't have thrown a wobbly on Tuesday at the voice of enraged Cork Corporation member, Con O'Leary (and recent member of the Southern Health Board), urging the State's corporations and health boards to withdraw their advertising from the Sunday Independent.

Given that last Sunday's fat harvest of medical/healthcare recruitment advertisements included nine pages of large display ads for at least six health boards and four major hospitals as well as the likes of Rehabcare, Enable Ireland (previously Cerebral Palsy), the Brothers of Charity, Cheeverstown School (for children with severe and profound mental handicap) and Franciscan Justice Services, Cllr O'Leary's threat must have seemed real and immediate.

The losses promised to be massive, not only for the Sunday paper but for its sister daily; the group's sales department promotes an all-in Thursday/Sunday deal for both. At the beginning of this year the Sunday Independent was quoting £18,000 for a full-page advertisement. If charged at full rate therefore, last week's nine pages of display health advertisements represented a potential income of £162,000. A threatened loss of this might indeed concentrate minds.

In any event, by tea-time that evening, Mr Fanning's fulsome apology - ". . . An article by Mary Ellen Synon . . . caused great distress and offence to many people, particularly to the disabled and also to those athletes participating in the Paralympics. I wish to apologise sincerely to them" - was dropping on to newsdesks.

It was a long, long way from that breezy Monday statement. As was Independent board member Maurice Hayes's sincere delivery to the Seanad on Wednesday. As was Gavin O'Reilly's wholehearted frontpage apology on Thursday.

As for the paper's proprietor, sports aficionado Tony O'Reilly, Mr Fanning claimed not to know what his views might be on the matter. But Joe Duffy had already told the nation that in a recent visit to the Central Remedial Clinic in Clontarf, he had noted a photograph on the wall of Mr O'Reilly handing over a cheque to the clinic.

Meanwhile, Miss Synon had dropped out of sight, obviously in the belief that her only duty was to her paper. According to Mr Fanning, she had done so because she was "preparing an article for next Sunday's paper".

As bewildered and distraught parents and friends of disabled people and disabled people themselves tried to make sense of her onslaught. Was she saying they were lesser beings? If so, what was the corollary of this argument? Had she ever met a disabled person? Could anyone be so out of touch with real life? Some called for her sacking.

Most were forgiving and merely looked for a purpose of amendment. Some tried to peer into her own psyche for explanations. What kind of person, they asked, makes a career out of being deliberately offensive, out of shallow attacks on the powerless?

She was entitled to her views, but why the virulence, the need to shout ever louder in monosyllabic tabloidese? Her readers, they argued, are rational, educated people in the main. Was she overcompensating for some perceived lack in herself?

"I'm sorry for her", said the tenor Ronan Tynan, himself disabled. "Is there an aspect of her life that was tarnished by her own upbringing?" Amid some eloquent statements to radio and the Seanad, Senator David Norris said he nonetheless felt "almost sorry for Mary Ellen Synon. . . She's now a moral leper".

OTHERS with half-decent memories noted, however, that she was not unfamiliar with the condition already, nor with the conundrum of forgiveness where she herself is in a position to bestow it. They recalled the story for which she is most famous; the one in which she starred as the vengeful ex-lover of the married deputy governor of the Bank of England, Rupert Pennant Rea.

When he refused to divorce his third wife and Synon revealed all to a downmarket English Sunday, Pennant Rea reacted in the Tory fashion of the time by appearing beside his faithful wife at home. As for his job, John Major said it was safe; the bank's confidentiality had not been compromised. And there it might have ended until Miss Synon popped up yet again to contradict him and thereby finish off her ex-lover. By that afternoon, his job was gone.

Five years on, in different circumstances, her editor certainly appears to be ready to forgive her. He has no intention of imposing any sanction. He can only hope the public will be similarly inclined.

Sean O'Grady, an Irish Paralympian in Sydney, writes in SportsSaturday how team members felt about Miss Synon's attack on them