Kathy Sheridan watched in court as the verdicts were handed down, and saw families and friends whose lives would never be the same again.
Few who were in that hot, packed courtroom last Wednesday evening will easily forget it. To observers who had sat through the 32 days of the trial, the families, friends and witnesses on every side had become familiar figures, quiet, reserved, but always civil and pleasant.
Most days, the friends and family of Denis and Mary Murphy, the parents of Brian Murphy, filled two long benches in the tense, overcrowded courtroom. Their two daughters were a constant presence, and their chatty nine-year-old son turned up occasionally, resting his head against a parent's shoulder. The parents of Brian Mulvaney, who had been through a similar ordeal after the death of their son, appeared regularly to support the Murphys.
Young friends of Brian Murphy dropped in between college lectures, passing The Irish Times crossword between them. Some days, the walls were lined with what seemed a fair proportion of the female population of UCD, secondary school pupils on work experience, relatives and friends of the 103 witnesses called by the prosecution, and the occasional court tourist, for whom the trial seemed to provide all the elements of a TV reality show.
For at least three of the four accused, there were girlfriends in court. Elizabeth O'Mahoney, who was Sean Mackey's girlfriend at the time of the tragedy, and was a witness in the case, remains his girlfriend. Mary Kate Finn, also a witness, is a girlfriend of Desmond Ryan. But for the most part, it was the fathers who kept vigil. They gravitated towards the same corner of the room, an area which gave them a view across to their sons.
Desmond Ryan's father, Pat, usually sat companionably beside David Frame, Andrew's father. In later weeks, Sean Mackey's mother, aunt and uncle, became regular observers, sitting beside Sean's father. Dermot Laide's father, Brian, set himself slightly apart from the others and was often accompanied by Dermot's dark-haired young girlfriend. A big, stocky, guarded man, the Castleblayney publican's practical black padded jacket marked him out as a country man. Only the most fertile, tabloid imagination could shoehorn him into the stereotypical, tabloid category of "posh".
Most mornings, well before 10 a.m., Brian Laide could be seen in the public café of the Four Courts, across the yard from Court 23, saying little, glancing through the newspapers, while the pale, subdued young couple beside him sometimes held hands across the table. Their presence attracted curious glances even from seasoned court habitues: Dermot with his familiar, solemn, bespectacled young face, demonstrating his good publican's training by carefully returning trays to their racks and getting up to deposit sugar wrappers in a bin; she with her Elvis-decorated bag, Hilfiger-branded T-shirt, wan face and increasingly hopeless, dark-ringed eyes.
In the courtroom, while his three co-accused became steadily more pinched and ill-looking in their constricting suits, shirts and ties, Dermot, his broad shoulders softened by sweaters, was notable for his apparent composure. The outward signs of stress were manifest only in his skin, growing pallid and more spot-prone as the weeks wore on.
While the Murphy family's terrible loss pervaded everything about this case, the agony evident in the parents of the accused young men was inescapable. At Brian Murphy's funeral Mass on September 7th, 2000, the UCD chaplain, Fr Gerard Tyrell - concelebrating with Fr Tom Nash of Blackrock College and Fr John Dunne of Gonzaga - articulated what made this case so terribly compelling: "It is every parent's nightmare that something like this could happen to their child. It is every parent's nightmare that their child could be responsible for something like this".
Amid the uproar and 24/7 analysis, a recurring theme was that while such tragedies afflict deprived areas every day, they were shamelessly ignored by the middle classes until it befell their own. But the fact is that while brawls between young men are commonplace, the manslaughter of an 18-year-old boy, in such circumstances, is not an everyday event, anywhere. The year Brian Murphy died, seven of the 44 unlawful male killings were of boys aged between 11 and 20. In 2002, the figure was six out of 51.
In several other ways, this case was different. The death of Brian Murphy, a middle-class boy from south Co Dublin, in August 2000, came at the height of public anxiety about teenage drinking, threatening behaviour and attacks on young men. In the week of his death, gardaí had received orders to take concerted action, following a steep rise in public disorder offences. Six days before, another middle-class boy, David Langan from Castleknock, had been killed in Portobello while waiting for a taxi.
Class aside, all this was occurring in a context in which the babyboomers of the early 1980s had reached the legal drinking age. They had their pick of part-time jobs which gave them plenty of money in their pockets and - regardless of socio-economic class - independence from their parents. At that most vulnerable age and state of maturity, they found themselves unleashed into a drink-sodden culture. And the intertwining of increased drink consumption and violence have been well documented, says UCD criminologist, Dr Ian O'Donnell.
There were clubs and drinks companies with no qualms about targeting barely-legal young club-goers with discounted, strong spirits and "shot" promotions, serving up head-banging concoctions such as vodka and Red Bull, while taking no responsibility for disgorging hundreds of them together onto transport-starved streets.
All of which explains, at least in part, why so many parents shivered and crossed themselves when they heard about the tragic death outside Club Anabel and thought, "There but for the grace of God . . ." The parents of the accused 19-year-olds found themselves cast into a three-and-a-half-year nightmare - the unusual delay being due to a legal technicality which also held up hundreds of other trials - that reached into a whole social class.
"It's not just those four young fellows that are on trial," remarked a parent of one of the accused, "it's Blackrock College." And, he might have added, their entire ethos, sports, and "silver spoon" lifestyles.
Blanket assumptions were made about idle, decadent, middle-class lifestyles. While on the one hand, the amount of publicity given to the case was resented by some who believed it would be better directed at marginalised areas, the same protesters were likely to comment that the four young men were bound to "walk" because of their money and connections.
Juries and judges were discussed, their likely class biases, and whether the professional and middle classes could still quietly look after their own. The case of Philip Sheedy was revisited, the driver convicted of manslaughter whose early release sparked the controversy that triggered the resignation of a Supreme Court judge and a High Court judge.
The background of Judge Michael White, presiding over the Murphy trial, was scrutinised. But the man born in the Inishowen peninsula, who was at one point a candidate for the Workers' Party, and who, as a solicitor, was one of the rare non-Law Library types to make it to the High Court, was unlikely to face charges of class bias.
Meanwhile, as the State was resting its case in Court 23, across the yard three young men from less leafy areas of Dublin were standing trial for beating a young man into a coma. They walked free, quietly without a single camera, after the judge ruled that their statements had been forced from them and were therefore inadmissible.
For the parents of the men accused of killing Brian Murphy, this was all alien territory. For adults accustomed to order and control in their private and comfortable lives, it was, as one observer put it, "truly a bonfire of the vanities". As the trial stopped and started and stopped, riven with legal argument, the parent of one boy remarked that one of the most distressing aspects of it was the cameras, "following your child, running up and down beside him, pointing through the railings at him".
The media exposure made them instantly recognisable. As this reporter walked behind one of the accused heading back to court with his father one lunchtime, a young fellow shouted: "It took five of you to beat the shit out of a fella half your size".
"It's been like that for several years," said a friend of one of the defendants, who had been studying at UCD. He was unable to socialise in the college, said the friend, because a small group of students who hung around the bar would shout cat-calls, such as "murderer", whenever he appeared. "Often enough, after a few drinks, he'd break down in tears . . ." A friend of another described how he had thrown up for several days after hearing that he was being charged in connection with the killing, and how he then put his efforts into protecting his family.
One parent, trying to reassure his distressed son that there would be an end to it all, whatever happened, was told: "I don't think it will ever be over".
Over the three-and-a-half years the four found different ways of coping. Andrew Frame got his economics degree and began working with Davy Stockbrokers; Sean Mackey also got his economics degree; Desmond Ryan is an agricultural science student and Dermot Laide did a sports management course in UCD and has spent the past couple of years working in his father's pub in Castleblayney.
It was against this background that the Murphy trial came to court in mid-January. Until Wednesday evening, an atmosphere charged with grief, distress and unbearable tension, remained no more than that. The four young defendants, solemn, anxious and respectful, rarely talked among themselves, and never while the jury was present.
Even when Andrew Frame was acquitted of manslaughter nine days before, there wasn't a sigh or a murmur. David Frame put his head in his hands, trembling, quietly dabbing at his eyes, only joining his son in the hall when he had composed himself.
On Wednesday, as the jury was deliberating, friends sat down beside them for the first time, chatting quietly. The jury had been out around nine hours and now had the option of a giving a majority verdict. But it was nearing 7 p.m. and time to go home when, suddenly, they re-appeared. The verdicts, that Andrew Frame was acquitted and Dermot Laide was guilty on all charges, would have been a cruel contrast but for the Frames' quiet and dignified withdrawal from the court. The parents clasped hands and walked out, away from the 42-month nightmare.
Back in the court, once a small flurry of journalists had rushed out to contact their newsdesks, a deathly silence enveloped the still-packed room. In the jury box, two women wept openly. All that could be heard was the distressed sobs of Dermot Laide's girlfriend as she screamed "No". Big Brian Laide clasped his wife and shook silently as he wept. As the relatives of Desmond Ryan and Sean Mackey watched, they too became distressed. "No winners in this," murmured a friend of the Murphy family.
Denis Murphy's head was in his hands. Mary Murphy looked across at the accused men. Their two daughters were crying.
And so it continued until yesterday afternoon and a kind of closure. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, the lights still twinkle around the sign for Club Anabel, where an 18-year-old boy once lost his life.