Mary Russell describes being the victim of a break-in with a difference.

A daring display of fearless endeavour took place in Dublin one recent evening when two men, watched by an uninvited but appreciative audience from the local pub, tried to get into to the house opposite through an upstairs window. The house was mine, and unfortunately for me I was in it at the time.

The first sign that something was wrong was when I heard a few unusual bangs and bumps upstairs. Going into the hallway and looking up, I saw a light cross the dark ceiling of an upstairs room.

The passing headlamps of a car, I thought. But the beam of light swept back across the ceiling, far too fast for a car to have reversed. It could be only a torch. And then a pair of heavy boots and trouser legs came out of the sitting room and started to descend the stairs.

Before you could say break-in I'd legged it down the hallway and thrown open the front door, working on the theory that burglars are better out than in. Which is when two very surprising things happened. As I opened the door two more men rushed in and the one coming down the stairs called out: "I'm a guard." Soon five of us - two plain-clothes men, a man and a woman in uniform and myself - were milling about a very small hall.

The gardaí's story was that they'd received a 999 call saying some men were on the roof of a house in the street parallel to mine.

Noticing an upstairs window propped open when they arrived, they put two and two together and made five: my house, they decided, had been broken into.

If anyone had asked me, of course, I could have told them all about the men on the roof: they were from the little halal cafe in the next street and had been up on the roof for three nights running, trying to align their satellite dish. One of them was from Baghdad, and we'd often chatted about places in his historic city that I'd visited.

A few days later, mulling over the fright I'd got and thinking that surely a knock on the door would have been a more civil way of doing things - the lights were on, which was one hint that the owner was in - I sought the opinion of one or two people.

"They had no right to enter your house in that way," said my very learned friend, but when the community garda dropped by on his bike he disagreed. His colleagues, he said, had been doing their duty - and had they knocked they could have prompted the burglar to make his escape. But what if I were in bed or in the nip in the shower? Or what if the householder were someone with a fragile heart? And what about boring things like ID cards and search warrants? In the heat of the moment and with the heart put across me, I'd failed to ask for either.

The cycling garda was sympathetic, although when I pointed out that mine must be the only house in Dublin to have been broken into by the police he looked upset. "Break in" was a little strong, he thought, suggesting "intrude" instead. But we were into semantics here, and it would take not a writer but a very well-paid lawyer to argue that one.

Still, what it boils down to is that the gardaí may enter your house, day or night, without a warrant if they have reason to believe there's a man on the roof in the next street. Bear that in mind. The next house they break into, sorry, intrude into, could be yours.

This is Dublin, of course. In Kerry, when I left a coat behind in Dingle it found its way into a friendly Garda car, which delivered it safely to its destination.

That's not to say they aren't friendly in Dublin. When the gardaí were leaving my house one glanced at the window to which his colleague had given him a leg-up and advised me to shut it. "Someone could get in," he said.

In case you're interested, the book that was keeping the window open was Roy Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, an excellent read and, weighing in at 688 pages, a terrific window prop.