Damien Duff's genius flourished because of the team ethic. The whole was infinitely more than the sum of the parts, writes Fintan O'Toole
And so it ends, leaving the nation with, in the words of Tom Waits, a bad liver and a broken heart. Just to dispel any lingering sense of euphoria, our leaders have decreed that the homecoming heroes should revisit the hideous embarrassment of 1994, when the men who triumphed over Italy in the Giants Stadium were humiliated in the Phoenix Park.
If you wondered why we have such need for heroes you had only to listen to the new Minister for Sport, John O'Donoghue, telling the nation in effect that he was only the Minister and had to take his orders from mysterious higher authorities whom he called "the security forces". In England, as they did a fortnight ago for the jubilee, you can have a million people in central London without any bother. Here, our leaders have so little confidence in their ability to organise a public celebration that we have to keep our team off the streets.
A rational view of the last three weeks is that we took collective leave of our senses. Soccer is essentially trivial. In a world where nuclear war has re-emerged as a genuine possibility, there is something insane about the vast expenditure of physical and emotional resources on a game that can be decided by sheer luck.
And if soccer itself is essentially peripheral, how crazed do we have to be to get obsessed with soccer issues that are peripheral to the soccer itself? When Sunday papers are leading with tittle-tattle about a former member of RTÉ's analysis panel, there is a loss of proportion on an epic scale. And yet, there is also a sense in which the World Cup helped us to regain our senses, to get back some perspective on Irish life. One of the reasons why there is such a bond between this team and its fans is that there is a genuine parallel between what they've done on the field and what we've experienced off it.
On the field, the players have enacted two great struggles: the victory of honest values over institutional incompetence, and the assertion of a collective ethic over a culture of individualism. This, as it happens, is what we needed to hear. If sport at its best operates as a metaphor for a society, the team acted like a consummate poet, touching the right image at the right time.
Public discourse in Ireland over the last decade has been framed around a crude choice between a tired, incompetent collectivism on the one side and a brash, careless individualism on the other. It is, of course, no real choice. The corruption of collective institutions, from the church to the police, from the law to politics, has loaded the dice in favour of an individualist ethic.
A perfect example of this over the last five years was the sporadic public warfare between Mary O'Rourke and Michael O'Leary of Ryanair. An important debate about public transport was dramatised as a clash between a weak, tired minister who hadn't the conviction to articulate a public-service ethic and a strident, vulgar champion of individualist enterprise. The notion that a collective public institution could also be brilliant and energetic simply didn't figure.
The genuine sadness at the core of the whole Roy Keane debacle is that Keane, in his own way, was trying to articulate that very notion. That he ended up looking like an egocentric prima donna was a grotesque but telling distortion. A prima donna would simply have given up on the collective enterprise and used the games as a showcase for his own talent.
Yet because the present state of our culture offered only that sterile clash between hopeless institutions and formidable individualists, Keane was forced to appear as a prima donna.
Remarkably, however, the team that he should have led went on to make his point for him. They provided us with a superb image of the collective strength within which individual brilliance could blossom. They gave the lie to the notion that personal luminosity and communal values are necessarily at odds. The charismatic genius of Damien Duff flourished because of the team ethic. The whole was infinitely more than the sum of the parts.
This is why, I think, this team touched us so deeply. In the previous two World Cups, we were grateful to the team for what they didn't do: screw up and make a show of us. This time, we can show our gratitude for what they actually did. They combined what we think of as traditional Irish virtues - guts, spirit, perseverance - with the sense of excellence and the self-confidence that have arrived in the last decade. They reminded us that the values of an older society don't have to be ditched for the energies of a new one.
It is perhaps appropriate that a frightened officialdom should treat them like toxic waste, corraling their homecoming into a safe space on the edge of the city. What could be more subversive of official values than a reminder that collective experiences stir our souls and that there is more to life than the making of money?