As a new focus of Irish ire, Henry is the main man

PRESENT TENSE:GRRR. AARGH. What an angry week it was. On Sunday night, Yusuf Islam irked a room full of people. But on Wednesday, Thierry Henry provoked an entire nation. We had been cheated out of a World Cup place. Or, though it wasn't admitted, we had been robbed of our chance to lose it for ourselves.

By Thursday, someone had started a Facebook site called “Let’s get over the Henry thing and move on with our lives!!!” But we didn’t want that. We wanted to be furious, fuming, incandescent, raging. It was hysterical and it was thrilling.

It appears on the surface that what underpinned the anger was the lack of satisfaction. We had a just cause, and an identifiable target, but we were unlikely to have any resolution. FIFA was never going to turn around and order a rematch. Henry acted like a highly trained customer service rep, listening to our outrage, sympathising with us, telling us he understands how terrible we must feel. But unless the French football association offers to replay the game, we are left shouting at a void.

In yesterday's Irish Times, Brian O'Connor contrasted the vilification of Henry with the economic cheats who brought the country to near ruin. It's easy, then, to view this outburst as a transference of our anger. In Henry, we have a clear, unambiguous villain. Economic villainy is less clearcut. We have spent many months blaming an array of characters, and occasionally ourselves. There may be a collective guilt, but there is no unity. And then Henry popped up, with a large red X attached to his back. We had a target we could all agree on.

Despite our international reputation for geniality, there has long been enough repressed anger among the Irish population that if you could somehow harness its boiling energy, we would have enough to power half the planet. But we tend to be grumblers, guttersnipes, behind-the-back whingers. We don’t like face-to-face confrontation. We usually back down easily.

We will moan and moan and moan about politicians, but when they turn up on the doorstep will be struck down with diffidence.

The verbal riot at this week’s Yusuf Islam concert was interesting, because we tend not to express our displeasure so publicly during gigs.

It’s not like that elsewhere. Go to a substandard opera in Italy, for example, and the slow claps and jeers will drown out even the most prima of donnas.

Sport does bring out the fury in us. On any given Sunday afternoon, there seems to be an average of three GAA referees crouched behind a low wall seeking shelter from a mob.

There was a Facebook site, “We Irish Hate Thierry Henry (The Cheat)”, with great vitriol attached to it.

There were conspiracy theories, even if such complaints about Fifa fixing it for big nations meant that we had to conveniently overlook the fact that Russia had been knocked out on the same night by Slovenia.

But in some ways, though, it was heartening to see how we expressed our World Cup hurt. There were no reports of death threats or of firebombings of Cuisine de France. Instead, how did so many Irish express their anger? By voting en masse in an ineffectual Le Monde poll asking readers who had deserved to qualify.

It was, briefly, a satisfying outlet for the frustration, but it was also an insight into our national psyche. We’ll show them, we said, by engaging in some international high jinks.

We knew from the off that all we could do this week was vent ineffectually; to twin the moral high ground with our moral victory. All that talk about sport being a place of fairness is nonsense. Fans understand fully that sport is fundamentally unfair; that most of its trading is done within a hurt-based economy.

And now, we have struck the mother-lode of hurt. Having spent a couple of decades sniggering at England’s obsession with Maradona’s 1986 “hand of God”, we will now set off along that same path.

We too will trudge it for decades. In the meantime, we will file the Paris events in our catalogue of woes. Because deep down we know that every injustice, every defeat, every cruelty will be refined and purified until it is eventually used to fuel the explosion of joy that will one day greet a rare moment of Irish sporting glory.