While Barry was kneeling to check if Conor was still alive, Stephen O’Brien was shouting and thumping the tops of cars parked along the Blackrock main street.

There was, of course, no garda presence in Blackrock that night. Questions were asked in the papers and at the trial about this. No explanations were forthcoming.

While Barry was kneeling to check if Conor was still alive, Richard Culhane went to talk to Laura Haines. He put his arm on her shoulder. She shrugged him away. She was crying.

‘Oh, you think you’re such a big man,’ she said. Her face was wet and shiny in the streetlights. ‘You think you’re such a big fucking man, Richard.’

This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.

Richard looked at Stephen O’Brien, who was standing in the middle of the street, crowing and jumping up and down. He looked at Barry Fox, kneeling beside the bloodied body of Conor Harris. He looked at the ragged ring of people that surrounded them. He heard the word cops spoken several times. People were pointing. More people were coming out of the club.

At this point Richard’s pulse was elevated and his breathing was harsh and sore.

He remembered that he felt extraordinarily happy. He felt a sudden sense of elated clarity.

He knew they had to get out of there.

He had trouble getting Barry to move. This is the detail that has stuck in many peoples’ minds: that Barry was reluctant to leave the side of the boy that a few minutes ago he had been punching and kicking into unconsciousness.

For many people, Barry Fox was the wild card, the boy who shouldn’t have been there at all. He was too gentle, said the people who knew him. At Brookfield there was widespread astonishment that Barry Fox, of all people, had been one of the boys involved in Conor Harris’s death.

For others, Barry’s moment of kindness in the aftermath of the beating could be seen as nothing but hypocrisy.

By themselves, these views are too simplistic, I think. It was entirely characteristic of Barry to kneel beside Conor’s fallen body to see how badly he was hurt, to see if there was anything to be done; just as it was characteristic of him to be in Harry’s Niteclub in the first place, drinking cheap cider with the Brookfield boys; just as it was characteristic of him to deliver one of the three kicks that knocked Conor out and that ultimately resulted in his death.

17

Because most of the attention during the arrests and the trial focussed on Richard Culhane and his family, I haven’t been able to piece together a great deal about the Foxes. But I knew Barry Fox. He was on the famous Senior Cup team that brought home the cup in 2001, the same Senior Cup team that Richard Culhane and Conor Harris were on.

(It’s important to remember, by the way, that just because Conor and Richard were on the same rugby team, this didn’t mean they were automatically friends. The papers made a lot of the notion that the dead boy and his victim had been teammates. But it didn’t work that way. Conor’s lingering aura of nouveau-riche unsuitability had always effectively excluded him from the inner circle of Brookfield Senior Cup boys. Conor was on the team, but he wasn’t part of the gang. Conor had his own gang, some of whom were on the team, some of whom were not.)