Events of a certain magnitude barge their way into our shared future. But some events reach backwards in time, too, and make their contours felt years before they ever get around to actually happening. Conor Harris’s death is one of these. We felt it coming, I think. Not that this did us much good. Not that it helped.

There is the fact of Conor’s death. And there is the gallery of interpretations explaining why it happened. Facts and interpretations: these are what I have. These are all I have.

In several crucial ways, the case remains opaque. I dearly wish things had unfolded in some other, clearer way. But I am helplessly stuck with the recorded facts. Reality doesn’t shape itself to meet the demands of art, and all storytelling is essentially a retrospective gesture. So I will follow the facts to their ends, to see what I find.

I’ve been afraid to tell this story, possibly because of what it reveals about the cannibalistic nature of my generation, about our hatred for each other, about our hatred for ourselves. I’ve been afraid to tell it because it seemed too dark, too unanswerable, too messily enigmatic to be told in simple terms. But I think I have to tell it, now. I am too alone in my fascination with it, too solitary in my fixation on the events of a few hours one night three years ago. Now that the trials are over, now that the papers have let the story grow cold, now that I have been left by myself, holding the frayed ends of all these facts, unable to tie them together in any way that satisfies me, I can try to talk about what happened. I no longer seem to have a choice.

This is a story about a single event and its consequences, about what happened before, and about how everything that happened afterward was different.

This is the worst thing that ever happened to us.

This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

3

This is what happened.

On the last night of summer, 2004, at fifteen minutes past three in the morning, a twenty-year-old student was beaten and kicked to death outside Harry’s Niteclub in Blackrock, County Dublin. Three other students were arrested just under a month later and eventually charged with manslaughter. The manslaughter charges didn’t stick. Two of the boys were eventually tried in a Dublin court for violent disorder. They were found guilty and served five months in prison. The third boy, also convicted of violent disorder, served eleven months in prison. The state then attempted to bring the third boy to trial for manslaughter, but due to evidentiary difficulties the DPP was forced to enter a nolle prosequi and the case collapsed.

The student who died was named Conor Harris. I knew him.

The three students who went to prison for violent disorder were named Stephen O’Brien, Barry Fox and Richard Culhane.

For a brief period Stephen O’Brien and I were at the same private school together. Richard Culhane and Barry Fox went to a different private school. But, in the way of Dublin schools, we all knew each other, in this way or that.