THEY say a kiss is a defining moment. But the truth is most kisses are mawkish impulses. Like mine to kiss Bertie Ahern 10 days ago. Yet in the strangest way it turned out to be a defining moment.

I kissed Bertie because I like him. I was grateful to him for stopping off to salute the Irish cricket team at the annual Sunday Independent Cricketer of the Year Dinner. I was sorry for him over the torture of the tribunal leaks. And then there's my personal penchant for backing the loser - and that is how he looked that evening.

The sun was setting over the National Irish Yacht Club at Dun Laoghaire, but there was no afterglow from this embrace. Instead, I found myself caught in the basilisk gaze of my colleague Alan Ruddock, puffing against the Palladian porch.

"Did you talk to the Taoiseach?" I asked him. "No way," was his laconic response. "He is a disaster and the architect of his own misfortune." No appeals to his sense of sympathy cut any ice. So I dropped the matter, saying I would see him in print.

I did see him in print. And Gene Kerrigan. And John Drennan. And Joseph O'Malley. And Daniel McConnell. None of them straining the quality of mercy for the Taoiseach. And all of them entitled to their opinion. As were Brendan O'Connor, Patricia Redlich, Eoghan Harris and Jim Cusack, who put the contrary view.

That's a democratic newspaper for you. Some people might go further: Professor John A Murphy famously described the Sunday Independent as "anarchic" because there were so many different viewpoints in it.

This tolerance for divergence and difference appears to be unintelligible to some of our competitors, particularly our British competitors. Accordingly, they seek to sabotage what they do not understand. And if that happens to coincide with commercial sabotage, all the better.

Every Monday without fail, the Irish Mail contains savage and often personal attacks on journalists in this newspaper. First thing every Sunday, Ted Verity (the Englishman in charge of the Irish Mail ) briefs some hapless hack on what he wants them to say about the Sunday Independent for Monday's Mail. For last Monday's paper, an article I wrote over 35 years ago in John Mulcahy's Hibernia magazine was dug up. This article is reprinted with boring regularity in the Phoenix, the Village and the Mail itself. Indeed it was first exhumed 14 years after publication by John Mulcahy's Phoenix the very week I took up work with Independent Newspapers 22 years ago.

In this article I wrote about the Official IRA's bombing of Aldershot Barracks, headquarters of the Parachute Regiment, which was carried out as a retaliation for, and three weeks after, Bloody Sunday where 13 unarmed civil rights marchers were murdered (and many others maimed) by the Parachute Regiment.

I said its rationale was that it was a military target. It was aimed at the officers' mess in the barracks of the Parachute Regiment where so many Poona veterans laughed after the Derry atrocity. The bomb was mistimed with tragic consequences. I said that while I was "depressed" at the murder of five innocent waitresses and their chaplain, I was also "sickened" by the hypocrisy of Irish media commentators who rushed to condemn that atrocity while condoning Provisional IRA atrocities.

I cited Franz Fanon on the rage and frustration of colonised peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change.

In that (surprisingly short) piece, I also laid out my socialist credo. I tried to live my socialism, at one time even sharing my home with a homeless family and Travellers. I was in my early 20s and it was to be some time before I realised very few really mean what they espouse.

I very quickly realised I was wrong to write it. But there were surrounding circumstancesto which the Daily Mail is notonly unsympathetic but brutally indifferent.

Never in my lifetime had the British been so hated in this country as in the weeks after Bloody Sunday. The images of that day where boys and men were shot in the back as they ran for cover, are indelible. Who will ever forget Bishop Daly pushing through, desperately waving his white handkerchief to save the wounded from further gunfire. These are images that are up there with the My Lai massacre.

The anger against Britain was on the scale of the aftermath of the executions in 1916. For weeks, Ireland burned - literally. The British Embassy was besieged for days and finally burned down. I know lifelong pacifists who hurled bricks, I know prominent members of today's Law Library who hurled petrol bombs on that day, I know respectable newspapermen who went north with the intention of joining the IRA.

For a few weeks, Irish ambivalence towards Britain was discarded. Then we reverted to type, which towards the British is a confusing mixture of tolerance, forgiveness and the occasional irrepressible folk memory. Over at the Mail, they will never understand us, which is why Ted Verity has to ring up a journalist every Sunday and dictate to them his anti- Sunday Independent rant for the day.

Mary Ellen Synon was last week's medium for the Mail. She gives the game away in her opening line. "I don't like to do it.Nope. I don't like to do it at all," But she did.

Mary Ellen Synon once worked for this newspaper. Her contrarian views were published here - with one famously painful consequence - and we all got along well. She seems unafraid of ploughing a lonely furrow. Like when she went public in the Sunday Mirror and the Dail Mail in 1995 about her relationship with Rupert Pennant Rea, deputy governor of the Bank of England and the fact that he let her down.

She lived in Ireland at the time and I think I was the only journalist to defend her in print. I see no irony in the fact that she was the one who agreed to do the Mail 's dirty work last week. She did not ask me to defend her and I did not do so to buy any loyalty but rather because I believe that the only thing we possess with certainty is our story, that she was entitled to tell it and because I still believe there are times in this life when a defenceless person is entitled to a bit of retribution.

This has been a historic week in Ireland. Many troubled sections of the Northern communities have completed their long journey. Faces which were once anathema now look benignly down from southern election posters. It is worth remembering that the Official IRA gave up their "armed struggle" shortly after Aldershot and began that journey over 30 years ago.

My own journey is but a grain of sand. I don't expect the people who run the Mail to understand. They never will. But kissing a Fianna Fail Taoiseach at a cricket dinner at a Dun Laoghaire Yacht Club, in its own way, summed it up. It's called pluralism.

Anne Harris

- Anne Harris