Why did Alibanga Musifer do as he did last week? A dedicated Christian, this refugee from the Congo single-handedly tackled an armed post office raider in Dublin.
The two of them fell through a plate-glass window, and though Alibanga was seriously injured, he nonetheless continued to hold the culprit until gardaí arrived.
What drove such unbelievable courage? For he had nothing personal to gain from his actions, and everything to lose. And though his faith in God was touching - he apparently shouted in the middle of the affray, "You cannot kill me, my God is with me" - part of him could just as easily have concluded that that kind God of his would forgive him if he didn't intrude.
But if the voice of caution spoke, as it would have done for most of us, he paid it no heed. He acted, at great risk to his life, and prevented a robbery.
Some might ask: why? It was only money that was being stolen. But it was not a question of money. It was a matter of order, of the maintenance of law, and a reassertion of the social contract between people which turns aggregates of strangers into this thing called society.
There was a time in Dublin when many people could have been expected to have acted as Mr Musifer did, but those days are long gone. We are no longer a society which spontaneously feels the need to enforce the norms of decency and civilisation upon criminals; we apparently leave that to African visitors.
Is it that he is an African which prompted him to behave as he did? Can it possibly have been because he recognised that when men see wrongdoing and fail to curb it, then the inevitable consequence is what his native country - and a dozen of its neighbours - are undergoing? And have we become so corrupted by easy affluence and the moral disease of the peace process that we no longer know right from wrong any more?
The day that Mr Musifer was making a hero of himself had the makings of a good day for Irish nationalism. The SDLP gained South Belfast, a victory that was earned simply and solely because Alasdair McDonnell had gone at Sinn Féin's hypocritical, lying throat. In political terms, finally, be had done a Musifer, and his reward was that which invariably comes to those who take the lead in politics, and who show moral clarity. Not merely did he rally the nationalist middle class of the southern suburbs of the city, but he drew unionist votes too. In times of moral confusion, people want simple certainties, and he appeared to provide them.
That evening on RTÉ's Five Seven Live, his party colleague Denis Haughey sounded a similar note. Indeed, but for the fact I was sitting at home listening to him, and few would maintain that I have a Northern accent, I would have said it was me in the studio. But there he was, blaming the two governments for the fate of David Trimble: the unremitting diet of concession and appeasement to terrorists must have a political price, and David Trimble had paid it. How could anyone negotiate with a political party which uniquely had a gun in its hand in the negotiating chamber, with the implicit threat that it was going to use it? All the IRA's promises to disarm had come to absolutely nothing.
Tears of joy were running down my face. This was the old face of the SDLP, before it had been corrupted by the peace process. This was the voice of Seamus Mallon when he heroically confronted the fascism of the IRA in Armagh. This was the voice of Paddy Devlin, who obstinately refused to stay silent while the jackboots sounded across Andersonstown, from where he and his family were finally driven after an IRA gang beat his son to the ground and urinated all over him. This was the voice of Gerry Fitt, who knew all about opposing tyranny. While the predecessors of the IRA were collaborating with the Nazis, he was serving on Atlantic convoys, doing his small bit for world freedom. As SDLP leader, he opposed the IRA in the 1970s; his reward was for terrorists to break into his house. He drove them off with his gun; however, his days in Northern Ireland were ended.
But it seemed last Friday that all was not lost, that nationalist Ireland was rediscovering its moral compass. All right, the Sinn Féin vote was up on 2001, especially in West Belfast, but we know about the moral values of that benighted region, which had turned its back on poor Jean McConville's bones. However, the SDLP was showing leadership and was speaking with a moral clarity that had been absent for years.
My joy lasted two days - until Sunday, VE day, when Alasdair McDonnell reverted to the pre-McCartney, pre-Northern Bank, pre-Colombia Three, pre-Stormont spying ring, pre-Castlereagh, pre-Florida gun-running appeasement spiel of the peace process SDLP.
He reiterated the tired old Hume line that there could be no deal without Sinn Féin - though of course one never hears Sinn Féin say there can be no deal without the SDLP. Once again, instead of confronting IRA-Sinn Féin with its delinquencies, he once again told the DUP that after seven years, it was time it lived up to its political obligations.
It had all been a dream: the SDLP was once again Sinn Féin's cypher, not its foe. Yet Ireland still had a hero whose initials were AM. His name is not Alasdair McDonnell but Alibanga Musifer.