We glory in gold medals and ignore Michelle's brass neck

Last week, at her press conference to protest against her four-year ban from international swimming competition, Michelle De Bruin's solicitor Peter Lennon compared her case to "many Irish people in different jurisdictions who have been accused wrongly of offences". The buttons that were being so deftly pushed have names like Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire Family, and perhaps Elaine Moore on them. The public was being invited to regard a well-to-do swimmer found to have broken the rules of her association to people who had been branded as mass murderers, forced to spend the best years of their lives in jail, and who received justice only after long, despair-filled years of being shunned and ignored.

We were being asked to see Michelle De Bruin as, perhaps, another Annie Maguire. Mrs Maguire, it may be recalled, was not merely branded as a vicious terrorist and sent to jail; she also had to watch the same thing happening to her husband, her two sons and her brother. The grief, rage, despair and numbing cruelty of what happened to her, or to Gerard Conlon, Paul Hill, and the other scapegoats for the IRA's deadly campaign are now, apparently, a useful reservoir of emotions for anyone on the wrong side of a judgment.

Two things are remarkable about Peter Lennon's comparison of his client to such well-known victims of outrageous prejudice. One is its sheer effrontery. And the other is its effectiveness. Tasteless and exaggerated as it is, it seems to have worked. One of the fascinations of the De Bruin case is what it tells us about the Irish self-image at the end of the 20th century, and nothing about it is more revealing than the evidence that traditional Irish persecution mania is still alive and well.

Normally, when sporting heroes are adjudged to be cheats, the nation they represent tries to distance itself from them. The shame and unhappiness are in direct proportion to the pride and pleasure once derived from the hero's achievements. That this has not happened to Michelle De Bruin says a lot about her. It is a tribute to her intelligence, eloquence and grace under pressure.

But it also says a lot about Ireland. From polls and phone-in programmes, it seems that at least half of the Irish population believes that Michelle De Bruin is innocent. Implicit in this belief is a willingness to accept that the most successful Irish athlete of all time is the victim of a ruthless international conspiracy. Because she had the misfortune to beat an American favourite, Janet Evans, in the 1996 Olympics, "they" (whoever they are) have been out to get her. In order to destroy her, "they" enlisted the support of some of the most respected sports journalists in Ireland, such as Tom Humphries, David Walsh and Paul Kimmage. They also secured the co-operation of Al and Kay Guy, two people known for their devotion to Irish sport. They got a highly reputable scientific laboratory and the three international lawyers who judged the case to either actively play along or to neglect their duties to such an extent that they failed to spot the gross deception that was being perpetrated. And having gone to all of this trouble, the unknown conspirators didn't even bother to put a banned substance into the samples, but contented themselves with throwing in a dash of whiskey.

All of this is, of course, possible and it is quite right that, in a legal sense, no final judgment can be made until all the proper procedures have been exhausted. But public opinion is not a court of law. In any normal society, the reaction of people asked to believe such an extraordinary claim would be, "show us some evidence." How come that, in Ireland, a substantial section of the population, perhaps a majority, finds it credible in the absence even of a detailed allegation of skulduggery, never mind a compelling case that such a wicked conspiracy was indeed carried out? How come, in the eyes of many, the villain of the piece is not the woman found guilty under procedures her lawyers regarded as fair, but Tom Humphries, a journalist whose work on the story has been a model of intelligence, courage and the proper scepticism that distinguishes journalism from public relations?

The answer, of course, lies with our old friends, the Most Oppressed People Ever. The MOPE syndrome, the biological remnant of a disease we once had, is apparently still in the blood, ready and able to recur when our immune system is weak. Rationally, we know that if there is a problem with the outside world's attitude to Ireland, it is that it is much nicer, cuddlier and softer than it deserves to be. Yet dangle before us the notion that They are out to get us, that somewhere out there are powerful forces bent on our destruction, and we snap at it like crocodiles. It is, after all, a deeply ingrained habit. For most of the history of the State, it was a quasiofficial truism that whatever was wrong with us was Britain's fault. Religious conservatives, likewise, have long had a tendency to blame whatever they don't like in Irish society on outside influences. And Michelle De Bruin has played on this paranoid patriotism with breathtaking skill. She has made herself into a dream image of contemporary Ireland, at once traditional and international, native and cosmopolitan. Her evidently sincere love for the Irish language gives her a natural advantage, allowing her to enlist in her cause all the vague but powerful public sentiment that Gaelic evokes. At her press conference last week, she brilliantly elided these cultural resonances with the notion that her enemies are out to get Ireland itself rather than just her, by making an emotional appeal to the honour of representing "mo thir fein" in Irish.

Stir in her lawyer's none too subtle attempt to recruit the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Family to her side, and you have an old concoction that still has a mighty kick. The story is no longer about doping control forms and specific gravity and Versa Pak sample kits; it is about how, yet again, they're hangin' men and women for the wearin' of the green. Our heroine is suddenly Michelle Ni Houlihan, fighting the great, perpetually doomed fight against foreign perfidy.

And many of us, it seems, are still gluttons for punishment. So strong is the masochistic pleasure of being victims that we are willing to fall for any appeal, however absurd, to our sense of persecution. So appealing is the notion that we are being done down that we are inclined to forget that whatever Michelle De Bruin has done, she did it for herself, not for "mo thir fein". So alluring is the image of a gallant Gael holding on to her hard-won gold that many of us choose not to see the brass neck on which those medals were hung.