For weeks, headlines across the country talked about how she was "trapped" in her car "for hours". She was "terrified"! Protesters were brought up on serious criminal charges over this incident of "kidnapping" and "forceful detention".
High ranking police-people testified on the stand that her car was unable to leave the area due to the protesters, for hours.
Then, it came out - leaked on social media - that video footage from multiple angles proved beyond doubt that the incident had been completely overblown.
In fact, she could have left at any time, with plenty of space behind her car. All those police sergeants and the Tánaiste herself were lying out of their teeth.
The response from Irish media was to try and put restrictions on social media. They ignored the story for a while, then a few years later printed stories about her "recalling her trauma" at the protest.
So yeah. This was a high profile incident with an entire country watching - imagine what they do when the accused is 'just some professor or journalist or whatever'.
It's indeed stupid how the Irish media are obeying the government's spin though.
You've reminded me about what happened to Maurice McCabe though.
Summing up from memory: he gave detailed evidence about widespread systematic corruption at the highest levels and below in the Irish police.
Shortly after, he was accused of stealing a pedo priest's hard drive from evidence. Accusations, later found completely untrue, were made by a garda of him doing bad things to young people.
Shortly after, a "copy and paste error" in a Tusla (Irish child services) database accused him of molesting a Garda's underage daughter at a birthday party.
After a huge fight involving many years of horrific struggle, multiple Garda Commissioners and a Minister for Justice resigned over the series of incidents. McCabe received a 5 million euro settlement. But for many years, the vast majority of the Irish media refused to touch his story; and even after it all came out they continued to report on it in the most twisted way possible. For example, they never mention, when discussing the "copy paste error", that this was in fact the third attempt to smear McCabe in this way.
(A brief timeline of the saga: https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20442857.html)
Stupid isn't the word you're looking for - it's 'complicit'.
And trying to make a show highlighting the dark side of policing would be close to impossible these days. Movie shooting relies a lot on the police for things like crowd and traffic control, and even for using real cops and equipment in some scenes. After one episode there would be enough "unfortunate incidents" to make it impossible to continue effectively. It's the same story as with the Pentagon and military themed movies [0][1].