This may be the best primer on the subject of apologies we've ever read. It's by Tom Savage in Ireland's Sunday Business Post.

Excerpt:

A good apology is the public relations equivalent of a fire blanket. It douses the flames and reduces the possibility of permanent scarring. Yet good apologies are rarely deployed. Indeed, apologies of any kind are rarely deployed...

When it comes to business, a key reason for the dearth of apologies is the legal profession. Any lawyer instinctively baulks when faced with the possibility of issuing an apology, believing that it may serve as an admission of guilt and lead to legal penalties.

When it comes to political apologies, the obstacles tend to be placed by colleagues who feel the other guy deserved it, who feel the apology will connote weakness and who hope the problem will blow over.

Even when those obstacles are surmounted, apologising isn't easy. PG Wodehouse said that a good rule in life was never to apologise. "The right sort of people do not want apologies and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them," he said.

All these factors tend to get in the way of the first key element of a functional apology, which is that it is timely. A delayed apology may lead to the accusation that it "took you long enough" or "it had to be beaten out of you".

After promptitude, the next key factor in a good apology is acknowledgement -- a clear public acceptance of the damage done, the wound inflicted and the outrageousness of the verbal assault. The tenet is: if the offender doesn't articulate it, the offence festers.

For example, saying "sorry about that" when you have stood someone up cuts to the chase rather too quickly. The person stood up needs to hear you talk about how mortified they must have been, sitting on their own in the restaurant, how humiliating it was to have all the waiters sniggering, and how awkward the following day's questions from co-workers were.

Mollification requires offenders to move from their own point of view to that of the other person and to make explicit their understanding of how the other person felt...

Even an acknowledgement doesn't prevent the conditionality reflex kicking in. That's where the offender says something such as "I'm sorry if you felt insulted by my comment", which carries the implication that "what I said was okay, it's just you got touchy about it". Conditional apologies are lethal, complicating the original blow without any gain to the person making the apology...

None of this is easy. Somerset Maugham once said that weak men lay an exaggerated stress on never changing their minds...

The final element of a good apology is to make good the damage. In commercial terms, that means some kind of offering calculated to make it up to the customer. In personal terms, it can mean seeking out the offended person in a public context -- since the insult was publicly delivered -- and attempting to rehabilitate the relationship.