Northern Irish couple, Eamon and Antoinette McGuckin, from Maghera, arrive at a resort in the Algarve on Saturday with their three young kids. The family go to the local bar at tea-time, during the 'Happy Hour' where alcoholic drinks are half price. A couple of hours later they reappear in the hotel foyer, drunk as proverbial skunks. He collapses in the hotel foyer, then she falls into a drunken stupor in a chair. The kids start to cry and the authorities are called. Both parents are escorted and detained by police at the local hospital while the children are whisked away to some kind of abused children's home. The parents are accused of 'abandonment' by child care authorities.

And the rest is hysteria.

Hands on hearts, how many young people — and perhaps not so young — have not done something similar while on holiday? Ok, so you might have felt really bad about it afterwards and vowed "never again!" but I'm guessing there are a fair few of us. I say "us" because I too was once caught out by the lure of the large measures ... About 16 years ago, my ex and I were doing a tour of the Canary Islands.

When we arrived on Gran Canaria we were really disappointed with the resort which looked like a grimy suburb of Birmingham and our hotel room which overlooked a multi-story building site and was nowhere near the beach.

So on the first evening we took a stroll, hoping to find somewhere picturesque, and ended up in a cocktail bar which was covered in fake vines and plastic palms but in the twilight at least, it looked exotic and tropical. Now, as anyone who has ever been to a Spanish or Portuguese tourist resort knows, drinks are twice the size and half the price as they are back home. I was drinking Bacardi and Coke which was my tipple at the time (and never after, for reasons about to be explained). The bar man was charming as they usually are and kept the drinks coming while chatting to us in broken English.

In my defence, during our one hour session, I only actually had three drinks but because it was 'happy hour' there too, each drink was a 'double'. And each measure was approximately a third larger than in a pub in Belfast. It doesn't take a genius to work out then that what looked like three drinks was effectively the same as lining up eight measures of a strong spirit and knocking them back one by one in a very short space of time.

The next morning I awoke in the bath. I'd absolutely no recollection of the walk back to the hotel, but apparently I'd sat in a hedge and refused point blank to walk because "my legs weren't working properly". My poor husband had to carry all nine stone of me for half a mile and then, with the help of the concierge (who had no doubt seen it all before), hoisted me into the bath where I was left, head propped up with a pillow "in case I got ill". Urghhhh.

We didn't have kids back then, but if I had they would have been with us. And certainly, as regards myself, I could easily have ended up having one too many. What had started out as a quiet stroll had accidentally ended up in a drunken haze for me, but it was simply a matter of miscalculation.

I'm not saying it was a very responsible way to behave, but you live and learn. And who, hand on heart, when they've had a few friends round at home, hasn't opened that second bottle of wine, while their kids are in bed? Yes, you may feel just pleasantly relaxed and perfectly in control, but could you drive a child to a doctor in an emergency? What happened to the McGuckins is highly regrettable, but let's not get too hypocritical. Besides, had this been at any other time or in any other country, it is highly unlikely that this 'event' would have even made the headlines. But this was Saturday, May 3, the first anniversary of Madeleine McCann's disappearance.

Not only that, but it happened just down the road from the resort in Portugal. And Portugal, Europe, indeed the whole world, seemed to be on a heightened state of alert. The alleged negligence of the McCanns had served as a sorry lesson to us all about the possible repercussions of child abandonment and neglect. At any other time and in any other place, those parents would probably have been escorted to their room by a disgruntled tour operator, the kids would have been put to bed and they would have woken up to a miserable hangover and a good telling off.

I've seen it happen before on package holidays and I daresay so have most tour guides. The local authorities need not have been involved. It probably would not have become a police matter, let alone an international incident.

Assuming there is no other explaination, the one mistake these parents made was not knowing their limit. Their kids were close by and the night was still young. To describe it as 'abandonment' is ridiculous and a hysterical over-reaction launched off a bandwagon.

Had they left their young children in the apartment alone while they intentionally went off for the night with friends then, yes, it would have been an incident worthy of national scandal.

The McCanns have taught us that.