Boys and girls who grew up mixing easily, weaving in and out of the each others' circles, can now barely meet each others' eyes, let alone speak, writes Kathy Sheridan.
The Club Anabel killing convulsed the country. People have talked of little else.
Polite discussions were wont to end in anger, triggered by a mild expression of sympathy for the families of the accused, or a suggestion that the killing was the result of "a few moments of classic drunken madness" and that anyway, the "other crowd" had started it.
To which the unanswerable retort was that an 18-year-old boy, someone's precious child, adored brother, life-long friend, was rendered defenceless, outnumbered and isolated, kicked and punched while he was down and no danger to anyone - and lay dead at the end of it.
But 44 treasured boys and men were unlawfully killed in that same year. Six were under the age of 10, and seven under 20. Yet none came back to haunt us like Brian Murphy.
Part of what made it different was that lurking sympathy for the accused boys and their parents, an empathy that sprang from a dawning horror that any one of them could have been the adored son reared in the image and values of any normal, aspirational Irish family.
So was it merely sympathy for your own class, or as the question was baldly posed on phone-in shows: "If the accused had been a bunch of skangers from Darndale, would you be feeling so sorry for them?"
Around the Four Courts, among professionals in constant contact with the dark side of humanity, reactions were just as varied.
"The parents of all five boys are from the same generation and same socio-economic groups as those at the top of their game in this city's legal and commercial life. Their children are around the same age. Of course there is terrible unease," said a lawyer unconnected with the case, but who happens to be acquainted with two of the families involved.
Several significant young eyewitnesses had notable legal connections. But who could argue that any of this worked in the accused youths' favour?
Boys from Darndale would not have attracted such public notoriety in the first place.
They would not have been relentlessly pursued by cameras, their homes splashed around the media, their parents' level of affluence scrutinised, their schools' ethos and sports held up to judgment.
"It's a kind of inverted snobbery," suggested one lawyer. "Or is it that we believe boys from such backgrounds were reared to know better?" wondered another. "And if so, is that just another kind of prejudice?" While the Club Anabel case ground on through long days of legal argument in court 23, one criminal barrister, for contrast, directed this reporter into Judge Desmond Hogan's efficient, no-nonsense court, where 30 criminal cases were up for mention in a sweaty mill of nervy, paper-shuffling lawyers, gum-chewing garda witnesses and prison officers handcuffed to their charges (and one Ray Burke unencumbered at the back).
A south Co Dublin boy of the type around court 23 would have stood out like a flashing siren amid the procession of young men up for mugging, car-stealing, robbing with syringes or possessing firearms.
The difference here was the demeanour of the accused: the shrugged plea followed by the weary submission to a well-rehearsed ritual as they raised a wrist, robot-like, to be re-handcuffed to a prison escort and led away. About 70 per cent of her clients are recidivists, said a lawyer.
Across the yard, three youths of similar age to the Club Anabel accused, dressed similarly in dark suits, were on trial for kicking another into a coma outside a social club in a west city suburb.
By contrast with the intolerably tense, hot and heaving court 23, this courtroom was virtually empty but for half a dozen relatives of the victim, some garda witnesses and the required battery of barristers and solicitors.
When the three walked free after the judge ruled that their statements had been forced from them - a substantial story in itself, given current disquiet about Garda practices - there was not a single media presence, no-one to shatter the anonymity of these youths.
"Can you imagine the howls of outrage, the conspiracy theories, if the four Anabel's lads had walked like that?" mused one court official.
Despite cynical, early predictions that the four middle-class youths would "walk", the system's commitment to finding Brian Murphy's killer was beyond question. The State threw everything it had at it. That well over 1,000 people were questioned - the vast majority being middle-class teenagers who, as one detective noted, had never encountered a garda in an official capacity before - and more than 700 statements taken, made it quantifiably different to similar cases, as did the fact that over 100 witnesses were called, nearly half of them eyewitnesses, to a trial that lasted almost seven weeks.
Yet, after all that, Denis Murphy was right; the case raised more questions than answers. What turned this grieving father into a poignant modern version of Don Quixote, however, was that the questions were about such risible, old-fashioned, concepts as the meaning of courage, truth and justice. John Edwards, counsel for Dermot Laide, the only person to be convicted of Brian Murphy's death, had already said something remarkably similar, though it went virtually unrecorded.
In his address to the jury, he referred to the "possible baggage" of the witnesses, to the "great deal of self-serving evidence in this case", and to "something that lawyers call 'soft perjury'."
There seemed to be "an attitude", he said, "that to swear to something false is perjury, but to say that you don't remember or didn't really see what happened is not perjury at all" Yet witnesses swear on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
"There were," he continued, "a very large number of people outside Anabel's, yet the number who could tell you with any detail of what happened is remarkably small. And one would have to wonder at that.
"There has been an awful lot of generality, vagueness, generic groups, unidentified individuals, but specifics were sadly lacking in a great deal of cases."
What it meant, in short, was that while the public was wading into furious, agenda-driven debates about private schools, the nature of rugby, the pernicious effects of the Celtic Tiger and varying notions about what constitutes "posh", dozens of witnesses were swearing on oath that they never saw the faces of any of the kickers - numbering "three to four" to "seven to eight" - still less the man who delivered the kick to the head, that in Prof Harbison's opinion, killed Brian Murphy.
Collective amnesia, whatever its genesis, is not the preserve of any class.
The recent image of Liam Keane's two-fingered salute as he walked free from the charge of killing Eric Leamy or the parade of shifty, recollection-challenged witnesses before the numerous tribunals, all attest to that.
In this case, as John Edwards put it, there was "the sense of the whole \ thing being a great shameful incident and that any involvement is a shameful thing".
It's not difficult to imagine the dilemma in dozens of well-appointed homes in the weeks and years following the death of Brian Murphy.
In the fug of horror, shame and naked fear, whose teenage son or daughter would be the principled one to step forward voluntarily, to tell the unvarnished truth about a much-liked neighbour's child or school friend?
An eyewitness who knew one of the accused since childhood was forbidden contact with him in the three years before the trial.
"Stick to your statement," insisted one father to an offspring, whose recollection tended to vary in subsequent years but who duly stuck to his statement at the trial.
Nonetheless, for all the talk about middle-class cunning and self-serving evidence, one of the most unusual features of this case was the voluntary statements given by the four accused, some of them highly inculpatory.
These were given at a time when the charge was murder - only downgraded to manslaughter much later - and they could not have known what other witnesses were likely to say.
Said one astonished(non-legal) observer: "I was the son of a judge and the one thing impressed on us growing up was that if we were ever pulled in for questioning by the guards, we were to give away nothing, nothing but our names and addresses."
The only eyewitness evidence against Desmond Ryan, for example, was from one youth who saw him throwing a punch "over the top". Despite numerous descriptions of clothing of those involved by more than 40 witnesses, there was no reference to anyone in a yellow t-shirt, which happened to be what Ryan was wearing.
Undoubtedly, it was his own truthful, voluntary statement - admitting two punches to Brian Murphy's jaw area when the injured boy was trying to get up off the ground - that drew his conviction for violent disorder.
Seán Mackey's voluntary statement - "given warts and all", as his counsel, Anthony Sammon, described it - was borne out by the eyewitness evidence of a sober, uninvolved Wexford man. Mackey himself described how he was "hyper" and had run in and kicked Brian Murphy in the chest, after which he had run out again, clenching his fist and saying "something like 'this is mad'."
Dermot Laide, the only one from outside Dublin, the shy one of previously unimpeachable character, the only one against whom other accused made damaging statements and the only one convicted of manslaughter, was encouraged by his parents to make a statement within 36 hours of the killing, bringing with him the clothes and shoes he had worn the night before.
He admitted to kicking Brian Murphy "twice in the leg" and later would admit to giving him "two good belts". He always maintained that he only jumped in to defend his friend Andrew Frame.
What seems indisputable is that by sober count, some six people were involved in the fatal kicking of Brian Murphy. Only one has been convicted, and that without evidence that he gave anyone a kick to the head.
Where are the others? And what of the original "aggressors", as John Edwards described them? What of those who started the fight, or those who find pleasure in starting fights any night? Legally innocent, they can walk away.
In her impassioned victim impact statement, Mary Murphy mentioned "this talk about Brian's group. What group? If Brian was with a group he would still be alive because they would have come to his defence."
But there was plenty of evidence that he was with a group. Perhaps if they had piled in, he would still be alive. Perhaps not. But where does this leave parents whose insistent, parting advice to their sons, in the event of a fight, is to "walk away"? There were other nasty incidents outside Club Anabel that night.
There was evidence that earlier, another youth was surrounded and kicked in the head while on the ground by an unidentified group. He was lucky enough to be able to get up and walk away.
Forced to confront this brutish culture among the cubs of the Celtic Tiger, some have tried to pin down easy answers: schools' rivalry, "roid rage" (athletes' abuse of steroids), too much money, too few boundaries, head-banging amounts of alcohol In the end, all we know for sure is that boys and girls who grew up mixing easily, weaving in and out of each others' circles, can now barely meet each others' eyes, let alone speak.
Those gilded youths who shared easy laughs and cans and scams have been forced to confront their own fragility and mortality, been compelled to dig deep into their young souls and challenge another generation's breezy notion of where loyalty, friendship and self-preservation end, and truth and justice begin.