At one level it might be thought possible to view Mr Liam Lawlor's special airport treatment in a benign way. Aer Rianta and its staff have a reputation for courtesy and consideration to passengers while operating in often difficult conditions - at Dublin airport in particular.
Passengers with particular needs or in distress, perhaps as a result a bereavement, will usually get special help if they seek it.
In this case, according to Aer Rianta director, Mr Dermot O'Leary, Mr Lawlor's wife, Hazel, requested assistance to avoid the distress of media attention on the couple's return from the USA. On the outgoing journey, she has said, she and her husband were harassed by media to the extent that airport police had to intervene.
Had Mr or Mrs Lawlor put a request for special clearance on their return journey to the Aer Rianta officers on duty it would have been considered on merit. The duty manager and the police would have weighed up the rights of the Lawlors' to their privacy against the rights of the media to report matters. Whatever the decision, there could then be little cause for complaint.
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But it was wrong for Mrs Lawlor to call in Mr O'Leary, "a friend of many years' standing" and it was doubly wrong of Mr O'Leary to make special arrangements for Mr Lawlor. He is a public figure in deep odium and disgrace - a politician who has treated the law and the institutions of the State with contempt. It is reprehensible that the staff of an important public utility should be directed from on high to accord him special privileges while simultaneously denying the media the right to do their job.
Mr O'Leary says the matter has "been blown out of all proportion." That judgment says something about Mr O'Leary's own sense of propriety - and perhaps what his counsels bring to the board of Aer Rianta.
An issue of proportion, nonetheless, does arise in this business. The question of Mr Lawlor's VIP treatment at Dublin airport is but a small thing compared to the court's decision to allow him to go to New York in the first place. Instead of the condign punishment which should flow from his contempt he was accorded the extraordinary privilege of picking the days on which he might choose to be incarcerated. There is public disquiet over Mr Lawlor's airport treatment. But there is deeper cynicism that he was at liberty to travel.