Denis Murphy, father of Brian Murphy, got it right at the Circuit Criminal Court on Monday, writes Vincent Browne.
There were six people around his son when he was kicked to death outside the Burlington Hotel, Dublin, that night in August 2000.
Some of those at least must have intended to cause Brian Murphy serious injury, in which case they were guilty of murder, not manslaughter. Nobody was even charged with murder.
Manslaughter arises where a victim is killed by an assault which was intended to hurt or cause injury to the victim, but where it was not intended to cause serious injury.
Are we to believe that nobody intended to cause serious injury to this boy by repeatedly kicking and striking him while he lay on the ground? Are we to believe that only one person intended to cause him just injury when he was repeatedly kicked and beaten?
One can sympathise with gardaí and the prosecution team in this instance given the absence of evidence which would have justified murder charges and the conviction of more than just one person for manslaughter.
But what does it say of the very many people who saw what was going on and failed to give full and truthful evidence, either to gardaí or in court?
And please note, I am not saying that any individual witness deliberately gave false evidence or deliberately withheld evidence. I am simply remarking on how surprising it was that nobody was able to identify any of the several people who, it seems, clearly intended to cause Brian Murphy serious injury, and how surprising it was that there was no sufficient evidence available to convict anybody even of manslaughter apart from Dermot Laide. Again, I am not suggesting that any of the other accused should have been convicted of manslaughter.
What all this amounts to is that a group of thugs beat a young man to death outside a nightclub, that this beating was witnessed by a large crowd, many in the crowd being personally acquainted with those who were assaulting Brian Murphy. Yet it proved impossible not just to bring murder charges against those who killed this boy, but to convict more than a single individual for manslaughter.
We know what this says about the thugs who beat Brian Murphy to death, but what does it say about the silent witnesses? We know about blood being thicker than water, but are school ties thicker still?
Mary Murphy, in her anguished address to the court on Monday, was right to protest about the characterisation of what happened that night as a "fight". It was an outrage and one repeated around the country every weekend of the year because of alcohol and a culture of violence that seems to have taken hold.
That culture does not come alone from the rugby world but it comes in part from it. There is a barbarity about the game and about the culture surrounding it that now deserves reconsideration. All-out fist fights and stamping on prostrate defenceless opponents are not unusual in rugby and rarely occasion disciplinary sanction. Violence is celebrated in that culture and perhaps the schools which celebrate rugby - most particularly, the school at the centre of the Brian Murphy outrage should reassess its identification with it.
But, as acknowledged, the culture of violence derives not exclusively from rugby, it is also a symptom of the increased barbarity of society and it is fuelled by alcohol. As the Eurostat statistics published yesterday show, we are Europe's foremost drinking nation and, to be honest, some of us are sneakily proud of it. Certainly glad of it are the drinks companies, among them Diageo.
Isn't there something sickening about the Diageo campaign about sensible drinking? One of the company's products was the subject of a promotional campaign in Anabel nightclub the night Brian Murphy was kicked to death. It fuelled the fires of madness and violence that night, and for the company now to protest its responsibility in promoting sensible drinking is nauseating.
Just one further reflection.
Do you recall the murder of a 16-year-old boy in Tralee on February 22nd, 1997? He was James Healy, of the Shanakill housing estate in Tralee. He had been beaten to death with an iron bar. You may recall it because of a controversy that arose about his body being left on waste ground for over 24 hours, awaiting the arrival of the State Pathologist. Photographs of the body were published in the Star and the Kerryman.
His family were also devastated by the killing. Denis and Mary Murphy, understandably, complained on Monday about the way they were treated by the criminal justice system.
The parents of James Healy first heard of the murder of their son on the radio news.
Then gardaí kept the family waiting interminably before allowing them even see their son's body and they were told nothing about the follow-up investigation. The Irish Times did not publish the story of their anguish, which was no less profound. It isn't just the formalities of the court system that are unfair.