‘Ah, the poor young fella,’ Father Connelly said to the other boys. ‘It’s hard to get by without your mammy.’

Up to a point, Barry made a joke of his mother’s death. It was what you did, in a boys’ school. The other boys recognized Barry’s need to be lighthearted about this subject, and they colluded in his jokey manipulation of Father Connelly and the powers-that-be. Only once did the subject become too serious for Barry to joke about.

We were all at Jesuit schools, of course. (Barry Fox was a Catholic, too.) In fifth year it was customary for the schools to organize retreats at a priory in Athy. Barry and I were in fifth year at the same time, and it happened that my class was on retreat at the priory at the same time as the Brookfield boys.

The priory was an eighteenth-century country home surrounded by forty acres of forested grounds. We arrived in our coaches and spent the first half of the morning getting settled in. This was in October of 2000. We were to stay for three nights – a long weekend. Then there was a Mass, and confession. Meals were scarce; we were expected to dedicate our weekend to fasting and contemplation, and on the Saturday afternoon we were taken on a ten-mile hike up the gentle slope of a nearby hill, which we were expected to complete without our socks and shoes.

I remember being surprised at how seriously the boys took the retreat. Usually they would have been horsing around, swapping stories about girls, throwing spitballs at each other. But they were hushed and thoughtful.

I picked out Barry Fox, on that first afternoon, standing off by himself near the entrance to the chapel while the other boys talked on the lawn in the sun.

That first afternoon we were broken up into groups and taken to dusty seminar rooms with high windows. ‘What is this, group therapy?’ Dave Whelehan asked, but somebody shushed him. I don’t know what you’d call those afternoon sessions: prayer groups, healing encounters. I don’t think I ever heard anyone actually call them what they were, which was psychotherapy by other means. Eight or nine of us would sit in a circle and have various discussions chaired by one of the monks of the priory. We were encouraged to talk about things we hadn’t talked about before. If the moment seemed right, we were encouraged to cry.

When the weekend was over, we were given little badges to wear. We took them back to Dublin and wore them as though we were Freemasons, a society bound together by the secret sameness of our hearts.

It’s possible that Barry Fox was wearing his priory badge on the night he killed Conor Harris. I can’t find this out for sure.

Because Barry and I were from different schools, we weren’t in the same afternoon session. I heard about what happened to him only later, from one of the boys who had been in Barry’s group.