It's the season to be sorry. An Garda Síochána is reported to be about to apologise to the family of Dean Lyons for wrongfully arresting and charging him for the abominable murder of two elderly women in Grangegorman in Dublin in 1997.
But he's dead, and very possibly the ordeal he suffered during his wrongful imprisonment was a factor in the drugs overdose which killed him three years later. Sorry is hardly enough.
The Catholic Church has the business of apologies right. Saying sorry in a sacramental act of contrition has meaning only when it is accompanied by an act of restitution of property or good name, by an appropriate penalty, and a "firm purpose of amendment". Without the companionship of compensation, punishment and a promise of future virtue, an apology is meaningless: it is the difference between comforting shade and empty shadow.
No restitution is possible for Lyons. Nor is it possible for Guiseppe Conlon, who was wrongly accused of membership of an IRA conspiracy, and who died in custody. He was the victim of a bizarre if informal conspiracy between the Metropolitan police and the IRA, with the aim of not convicting guilty IRA terrorists. Last year the Met declined to apologise for the crime done to him.
So, though one should welcome the decision of An Garda Síochána to apologise for charging an innocent and now dead man for a double murder he didn't commit, we might just wonder about those other dimensions which give regret substance. For, after a quarter of a century of occasional IRA apologies, we are a sorry-literate society. We know sorries like a sommelier knows wines. Without those dimensions of restitution and punishment, an apology is a pale shadow that can confer no serious protection from the heat of righteous anger.
And we are right to feel anger about the fate that befell poor, drug-addicted, doomed Lyons, the easiest pickings for police officers who wanted an early, sacrificial victim in order to keep their bosses and the public happy. It was high-profile, PR policing, which is to justice what a whore's promise of reform in court is to truth.
But at least PR stunts contain a sense of what is right, even if there is not the organisational will or courage to go the necessary distance to earn complete forgiveness. In the absence of any regret at all, as in the case of the Met's refusal to apologise for the wrongful imprisonment of Conlon, one gets the real feeling that the Met has no sense of right or wrong. For the Met apologises only under colossal political pressure, as in the case of Stephen Lawrence, whose murder by white racists it simply ignored at first. This is not morality but political expediency.
Possibly the Met feels no-one has apologised for the murders of hundreds of police officers in Ireland and Britain by republican terrorists, so why should it apologise for its errors? But this is lowering the forces of law and order into the same fetid moral swamp inhabited by the IRA.
President McAleese's apology last week was in a different class, as befits a good Catholic girl. True contrition requires prostrate abjection before those who have been insulted, and that is what she immediately and unconditionally offered. For she was wrong, and she knew it. Moreover, her regrets were probably twofold. One was the public one, which we've all heard. The other was the private one, about which she has been kicking herself with a regicidal frenzy ever since: she had unwittingly but momentarily reverted to that dreary tribal whinge of the Northern nationalist, more than whom nobody in all of history has suffered. Andersonstown was the Warsaw ghetto, the Maze, Auschwitz, the RUC the SS. In Liam Kennedy's words, the Most Oppressed People Ever (MOPE).
The early McAleese revelled in soupy recollections of her own 800 years of oppression; but she had successfully throttled that creature as she shaped the most successful presidency in the history of the institution. And then early one Polish morning, out popped the recidivist MOPE. Don't mention the war: I did once, but I got away with it . . .
She didn't. Now it's reported that the proposed state visit by Queen Elizabeth is being deferred. She of course remembers the war - which doesn't excuse her refusal to accept an invitation. For as unpardonable as a failure to apologise when an apology is due, is a refusal to accept one when one is fully and unconditionally given.
For sorry isn't the hardest word. It is one of the easiest. Unaccompanied by attempts at restitution or punishment, sorry is what you mumble as you unapologetically push through a crowd. It is the heart behind the word, and the deeds that accompany it, which alone give it meaning.