Club Anabel Trial: Three-and-a-half years after the killing of 18-year-old Brian Murphy outside Club Anabel at Dublin's Burlington Hotel on August 31st, 2001, the trial of four young men accused of the killing began in January at the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
It sat for 31 days and, for more than six weeks, people talked of little else.
Andrew Frame (22), Sean Mackey (23), Desmond Ryan (23) - all from south county Dublin - and Dermot Laide (22) from Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, pleaded not guilty to the manslaughter of Brian Murphy.
The summer's night fracas outside Club Anabel was characterised as "a few moments of classic drunken madness". It lasted no more than five minutes, the assault on Brian Murphy some 20 seconds, but the emerging details polarised the country.
When all the verbiage was stripped away, the hard fact remained that Denis and Mary Murphy's eldest child had been 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. The State Pathologist believed that he had died from a kick to the head. Although all four accused gave voluntary statements of their involvement in the fracas, there was no evidence that any of the four had delivered that fatal kick.
The case was not markedly different from many other drunken rows that had ended in tragedy but what distinguished "the Anabel's case" - as it came to be known - was the background of the four accused. All were from middle-class families, and although they had left over a year before the tragedy, all had attended the prestigious Blackrock College. Brian Murphy's company that night had been a group of past-pupils from the equally prestigious Clongowes Wood College.
This had initially led to the incident being ascribed to rugby schools rivalry, a suggestion described as "rubbish" by senior Garda investigators.
The wake-up call for parents, however, lay in the evidence of the extraordinary amounts of drink consumed that night by some of the accused, their friends and witnesses. Andrew Frame, who was subsequently acquitted and now lives abroad, summarised it well: "No-one planned for this . . . There was drink involved. There were a lot of drunk people."
Brian Murphy's mother, Mary, delivered an anguished victim impact statement to the court. She said she felt "brutalised" by the trial process. "Where is my baby in all of this? He's lost, I'm lost . . ."
Dermot Laide was convicted of both manslaughter and violent disorder and is serving a four-year sentence in Portlaoise prison, pending an appeal against conviction and sentence.
Sean Mackey is serving a two-year sentence for violent disorder, also in Portlaoise. His recent appeal against severity of sentence failed. Desmond Ryan was sentenced to nine months for violent disorder, which was deferred to allow him to do university exams. He remains free pending an appeal.
Kathy Sheridan