Monday

Context is all. That's my credo when coming to a conclusion about complex moral issues. I suspect it is the credo of good judges too. Such a judge is Mr Justice Richard Johnson, who in the Irish Times tentatively suggests we might like to revisit the death penalty.

Liberals will lay into him. But they will be ignoring inconvenient facts. The Irish Republic still retains the right to take life. The Irish Army has the right to use deadly force in combat. Armed gardai too. Like all states, we retain the right to execute our enemies, sometimes without trial.

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Normally I would rather remove a limb with a laser than launch a book. But Brian and Mairead De Staic of Ashfield Fine Arts sent me some shots of watercolours by John Blakey. Which is why I am at Wynn's hotel to launch Blakey's first and exquisitely illustrated story, The Tale of Lundravar the Dragon.

Blakey is one of the world's great watercolour artists -- he does not use Chinese white and his watercolours glow like oils -- and a moralist to boot. Like Lord of the Rings, Lundravar is an epic story of good and evil, which I expect to see on the big screen.

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Although I have not driven into Dublin city in years, it was raining so hard I took the car. As I round College Green I am pleased by the free flow of buses and taxis, but surprised at the absence of other cars. Later, Gwen gently explains that either (a) I am going ga-ga; or (b) I anticipated the announced end of the bus corridor. Prescience of course.

TUESDAY

To St Vincent's Hospital for my weekly meeting with modern medicine. Still pondering the pros and cons of capital punishment. All classical philosophers supported it. And while Christians are against taking human life, they will take part in a just war. Go figure.

But of course neither philosophy nor religion decides what we do about the death penalty. The case against the state killing someone in cold blood comes from our own hot blood. Evolution has also helped our evolving empathy with the suffering of other human beings.

And with animals. A society which does not condone cruelty to cats is less likely to condone capital punishment. But these benign beliefs are contingent on circumstance. If they carried a terrible disease we would kill cats without compunction. Likewise our current position on capital punishment could change in dire conditions.

My own conflicted feelings about capital punishment were formed by two stories. First, by George Orwell's A Hanging, his famous account of an execution he allegedly witnessed. (I say allegedly because he may have merely heard the story.) No matter. The artist can speak truths when the reporter cannot find facts.

Orwell pricks our hearts with precise (and most likely fictional) passages of prose. One of the most powerful is when the doomed prisoner steps aside to avoid a puddle -- although he will be dead a few minutes later. The detail puts us right beside the poor devil on his walk to the scaffold.

The second story may have been equally embellished -- but was equally effective. It concerned the last man to be executed for murder in Ireland. Michael Manning, a Limerick carter, was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on April 20, 1954. And I can still recall my repugnance when I was told that a couple of bored clerks in Dwyer's of Washington Street had come in early the morning of his execution and enacted a satirical mime of his last minutes

Wednesday

For a few minutes after the game finishes, I sit staring at the screen which shows the sad scenes from the Stade de France. Thierry Henry handles the ball in slow motion. Damien Duff sits and weeps. At first I cannot take it fully in.

So in a strange state I send a jokey text message to a friend. About Henry needing only one visit to Croke Park to convert him to Gaelic football. Yet I don't find what he did that funny. Later I try to take in what the professionals are saying. Numbly I notice that Trapattoni, Giles and Souness all agree that there is not much reason to rear up about it.

Go to bed in a bemused state. But I can't sleep. After two hours I get up and make tea. Long before the birds begin, shock has been replaced by anger. But now I need to know why I am angry. After all, it's only a football match.

Finally, in the dark before dawn, I figure it out. The child in us never dies. That child craves fair play. And the craving is never completely crushed. As adults we assume cynical airs, but deep down the child is still calling out, and we still hate to see honest men done down.

The Irish people are not angry on their own behalf. They are angry on behalf of Damien Duff, sitting there, deprived of his just deserts. It is the saevo indignatio of which Yeats speaks in his epitaph for Dean Swift, a "savage indignation" against injustice.

THURSDAY

By the end of the day the anger on the airwaves is challenged by cynics. The trade union of football players and pundits cannot see what all the fuss is about. Neither can Roy Keane. Happens all the time, they tell us, so why pick on this particular one?

Because this particular one was a World Cup game. Because context is all. Because fouls in a minor league match do not have the same moral power to corrupt.

Fouling is far worse when brazenly done to win a World Cup game, when it is seen by millions on screens around the world, and when it is indelibly imprinted on our minds by the internet.

A World Cup foul is a world class offence against the concept of fair play. And it is not only the child in every adult who is angry about it. The actual children of the world are also adversely affected by it.

A society which does not train its children to speak the truth and seek fair play will produce delinquent adults. That training requires role models. And the greater they are the greater the damage they can do.

Context counts here as well. The foul was not committed by some commoner, but by one of the great aristocrats of the game. As Shakespeare says: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."

We don't need a replay. We just need to mark the spot where the bad deed was done. There is no need to subject Thierry Henry to sanctions. He is starting a life sentence of shame.

FRIDAY

We could get a result from all this. We could stop throwing shapes about England. On Newstalk 106, Tom Dunne, half-humourously, reminds Barney Ronay of the Guardian that England's support for Ireland is not reciprocated. High time it was.

There is nothing remotely funny about ABE. It is a passive/aggressive prejudice, a tribal regression that makes us prisoners of a bitter past. Like Roy Keane.

Eoghan Harris

- Eoghan Harris

Sunday Independent