This went on until April 2004, when for no apparent reason Laura met Conor for coffee in the Arts Café in UCD and told him she couldn’t see him anymore.

Just over a month later she was going out with Richard Culhane.

Everybody said they were surprised it took so long.

Why did Laura break up with Conor?

I keep asking the same question here, but I no longer expect an answer. The question I keep asking takes various forms, but it always begins with the same word. That word is Why?

Why?

Why?

Why?

Why did Laura break up with Conor? He suspected it had something to do with him asking her whether she’d get an abortion if she turned out to be pregnant. He suspected it had something to do with his obsessiveness, with the fact that, in Laura’s words, ‘He kept staring at my tits all the time.’

I don’t think either of these theories is entirely satisfactory.

I think it had something to do with the fact that Laura was, and always had been, in love with Richard Culhane.

So why did Laura go out with Conor in the first place? Richard was single on Senior Cup final day in 2003. There were no reasons Laura couldn’t go out with him. So why did she choose Conor instead?

Why?

Conor took the break-up very badly. He went straight to the college bar and began a bender that lasted for two whole days. During that first afternoon he smoked two packs of cigarettes and began to feel ill. After seven or eight hours of ordering pints and shots and chasers – seven or eight hours during which he felt his chest begin to constrict and his breathing become painful – he went looking for Laura in the library, where he was asked to leave because he was making too much noise. He rang up Fergal Morrison and said, ‘Laura ended it, man. I need a shoulder.’

Fergal met up with Conor and they went to Russell’s in Ranelagh. Later Fergal would testify that Conor had tried to start a fight on the street outside with a Trinity student who asked Conor for a light for his cigarette. No one else who was there – Dave Whelehan, Caoimhe Murphy, some Brookfield boys – remembers this. Fergal may or may not have made it up to help Richard Culhane’s defence. I think I prefer to imagine that it did happen. It was the sort of thing Conor would have done on the night his girlfriend dumped him.

Laura told me Conor tried to call her seven or eight times that night. She refused to answer her phone. ‘I thought he should have had, like, more self-respect,’ she said. She said she felt sorry for him but there was nothing she could do. ‘He just had to deal, like anyone else.’

Conor’s aggression was one of the things Laura said she liked least about him. ‘But I suppose you kind of have to accept it, if you’re going out with a rugby player,’ she would say, with the faintest trace of pride.