Irish people hadn't realised how angry they were until Saipan, writes Frank McNally
Future Irish historians will struggle to explain how, in the summer of 2002, the Roy Keane/Mick McCarthy affair overshadowed the formation of a government. Even now, with our tears from the Tommie Gorman interview barely dry, there's a sense of perspective setting in. It takes an effort to recall that events on a Pacific island in May became a metaphor for a nation's hopes and fears.
Back home, politicians had been boring us numb for a month with arguments about what was right or wrong with the country. But in Saipan, the infrastructural deficit was dramatically symbolised. No skips for the training gear! A pitch like a car-park! 100 per cent under-provision of goalkeepers for the five-a-side! As Keane put it bitterly, expressing the anger of a people: "We're the Irish team. We shouldn't expect too much".
The Irish people hadn't realised how angry they were until then. Indeed, only a week earlier we had returned the outgoing government with an increased majority. But Keane was expressing the mood of national disillusionment that set in almost immediately afterwards.
On polling day - the date of the team's departure for the World Cup finals in the Far East - Keane was judged to have snubbed Bertie Ahern when he remained seated during their meeting at Dublin Airport, controversially preventing the Taoiseach from slapping him on the back. Weighed down by care and perhaps by the honorary doctorate he'd received from UCC, Keane was not in a good mood. And when - in another echo of the election campaign - he was approached by a giant leprechaun urging him to "cheer up", observers feared for the leprechaun.
A week later, in the wake of his banishment by McCarthy, we saw in the split what we wanted to see. Overheated Cork people even compared Keane to Michael Collins. But the crisis was less Béal na Blath, and more Béal na Blah-Blah, as the airwaves were saturated by partisans from either side. Like a family in crisis, the nation struggled to effect a reconciliation, and nobody tried harder than RTÉ's Tommie Gorman. He explored the issue from the starting-point that Mick was from Mars and Roy was from Venus, and they should learn to celebrate the difference and communicate for the sake of the children. Keane seemed to feel the nation's pain. "It's hurting you, this?" asked Gorman. "Of course it's hurting me," said Keane. It was hurting us all, then.
By autumn it was hurting McCarthy most. His year unfolded like a bad horror movie. First he commits the deed that stores up all the future trouble. Then the World Cup gets under way, and the audience hides behind the sofa as the ghost of Roy Keane frequently threatens retribution, only for disaster to be averted by such cheap plot devices as the last-minute equaliser against Germany.
Then came late summer's false calm. This is the bit in the B-movie where things go soft-focus and the soundtrack plays soothing music, and we know something is going to scare the bejayzus out of us.
For McCarthy, it happened in Moscow. Like Donald Pleasance in the Hallowe'en movies, he knew then that Keane was still alive. When we lost to Switzerland, he foresaw too many badly-made sequels ahead, and bowed to the inevitable.
As the year ends, Keane is still a metaphor for Ireland's problems, but the metaphor has changed. There's a realisation that we as a people have concentrated too much of our resources in one man, and that we need a national spatial strategy to relieve the congestion around the greater Roy Keane area. This is certainly true of the football team, which - even if Roy returns - needs to develop other gateways and hubs around which future development can revolve. (Some critics will say that the defence is enough of a gateway at the moment, and what we really need is a gate.) But in a broader sense, after a year in which he symbolised all our hopes and frustrations, it's time for us to let Roy Keane go.
Of course, as Mick McCarthy would point out, that's easier said than done.