In short, Mr Justice Harrington was a Brookfield boy.

It has been suggested that Mr Justice Harrington should have excused himself from his duties for the duration of the trial, that some other judge should have held the gavel while Richard and Stephen and Barry were in the dock. But what was the alternative? Most of the Dublin judiciary had been educated at Brookfield or Merrion or Michael’s or Gonzaga or Blackrock. What were people supposed to do?

‘OLD SCHOOL TIES DOMINATE COURT PROCEEDINGS’, ran one headline, underneath a photograph of some students dressed in the Brookfield colours, waving red-and-white scarves outside the court.

That first day, in his opening statement, Peter Mason asked the jury to consider the prior good behavior of the three accused. He pointed out that the manslaughter charges with which they were faced were simply not supported by the available evidence. He asked the jury to remember that up to six other young men had been involved in the Harry’s attack, and that his clients had been only peripherally involved. He reminded the court that all three boys had entered pleas of Not Guilty to charges of violent disorder and manslaughter.

(Manslaughter. A peculiarly vivid word, more vivid perhaps than murder. It conjures a casual bloodthirsty proficiency, as though the slaughter of a man were simply all in a day’s work.)

The prosecution insisted that Conor Harris had been the victim of a vicious and unprovoked attack, and that in denying culpability, the Brookfield boys were attempting to evade justice.

But the evidence was ambiguous and everyone knew it. The state felt that it could safely place the boys at the centre of the fight. It could tentatively assign to them responsibility for the kicks that led to Conor’s death. But accounts differed and the boys pled Not Guilty and the medical evidence couldn’t prove who had done what at what point in the fight.

The trial lasted for three weeks. I was there every morning and afternoon.

Mick Conroy testified. When the prosecution asked him to identify the two boys he had seen outside Harry’s Niteclub – the two boys he had already chosen from a line-up in Donnybrook Garda Station – he pointed to Stephen O’Brien and Richard Culhane. He said he had no memory of Barry Fox’s involvement in the fight.

Pat Kilroy testified. The prosecution made much of the secret statements he had taken on the morning after the incident, but Kilroy was staunch in maintaining that these statements corresponded in every particular to the statements taken from the boys at the time of their arrest. He said the boys had always been ‘of the highest character’ and that he was proud that they had been educated at Brookfield.

Laura Haines testified. Everyone expected her to cry, but she was stoical. She told the court that Richard had not been the one who threw the fatal kick. Richard, she insisted, was barely involved in the fight by that point. When the prosecution asked who, in Laura’s opinion, had been involved in the fracas at the moment the fatal kick was delivered, Laura said she was unable to recall.