So, have you calmed down yet? Has the sickening sense of moral outrage at this most egregious example of cowardly cheating begun to pass? Nope, I didn't think so.

At a time when the country has a collective sense of dread about the future, Wednesday's debacle left us with a feeling of paralysing powerlessness. Many people feel almost crippled emotionally after seeing the greatest away performance from an Irish team since the 2-2 draw in Amsterdam so cruelly robbed.

It gives you the impression that the gods are looking down from Olympus and competing with each other to see who can screw this country the hardest.

As a people, we're cursed with a genetic propensity for moaning.

Indeed, complaining about our individual situation has become almost a competitive sport and nowadays most of us dread walking into an office or pub for fear of being dragged into a game of 'I'm-more-screwed-than-you-are'.

Eighteen months ago, the talk was of how much your house was worth; these days the talk is about how much your house has lost and, as a result, we have frankly become a nation of bores.

But Wednesday? Wednesday was different.

We might feel on a conceptual level that we have been cheated by bankers, builders and bastards, but it's hard to even get your head around the figures involved -- do you become twice as freaked when the national debt goes from €1bn a month to €2bn?

The scale of our current misfortune is simply so vast that it's like looking at the electronic 'debt countdown' in Times Square, which features an ever increasing number of digits as America slides further into the red -- the figures are simply incomprehensible.

But the other night? Now that's something else entirely.

Because here we saw no dodgy backroom deal; no secret consultation between the masters of business who decide our fate -- here we saw, live, direct and in appalling clarity, Ireland being cheated out of something it had so heroically earned.

With the nation expecting a repeat of the limp second-half performance in Croke Park on Saturday, we were instead offered one of the proudest, most defiant displays from this honest but painfully limited bunch of players that genuinely made the heart soar.

Much has been made of some perceived link between the success of Jack Charlton and this country's economic boom years and most of it is complete rubbish, obviously, but nobody can deny the narcotic effect of seeing your country displaying itself so proudly.

Just ask yourself, did you think about your mortgage at any point during the game?

In fact, rather than obsess on the financial quagmire, did you do a mental 180 and find yourself wondering, however tentatively, that maybe you could work something out so you could go down to South Africa to support the lads next summer?

That was what the team promised -- a break from constant nagging worry that has affected us with a more deadly grip than swine flu and replaced that, however briefly, with the notion of travelling to the World Cup.

And travel we would.

A colleague of mine who was at the game in Croker remarked on the strange atmosphere inside the ground and out.

There was a sense of expectation, he said, a deep burning need for something to cheer about, something to lift the gloom.

And, on Wednesday night, to hear the 15,000 Irish fans sing their hearts out was something to cheer the heart of all of us, particularly when the French tried to jeer them down and only prompted the Irish contingent to sing even louder and win that particular battle. So to see the real battle being stolen by such a disgusting act of cheating further confirmed the national belief that we just can't catch a break at the moment.

Thierry Henry has always portrayed himself as someone who is smarter than your average bear -- an eloquent, erudite, thinking individual who was courteous to opponents and, basically, a man of honour.

So to see him faced with the biggest test of character he will ever be presented with and showing that, beneath all the bullshit, he was just the same as all the others, was particularly infuriating.

Let's put it this way, you would expect such behaviour from Anelka, but Henry had always held himself up as an example of football played at its majestic peak -- skillful, graceful, and to see him compounding his sin by hypocritically sitting down beside a distraught Richard Dunne and making an effort to console him was particularly enraging.

You can't blame Henry, ultimately, but you do wish he wouldn't be such a smug bloody hypocrite about the whole thing and that further fuels the sense of injustice we're still feeling 48 hours after the worst smash-and-grab in the history of Irish football.

My God, this even eclipses that night in Brussels and that Portuguese referee who scarred the psyche of Irish football for a generation.

Frankly, I had to be careful not to end up being done for incitement to racial hatred in this piece, but to be honest, wouldn't it have been great to stick one on the French, of all people?

Their arrogance, their unjustified swagger, their traditional sense of contempt for Ireland, had surely been the best dressing room motivator of all.

Managed by a whack job who relies on astrology and scathingly referred to us as merely an England B team, the news that that they had already booked their accommodation in South Africa in advance of Wednesday night was a typical example of obnoxious Gallic smugness.

But we can't catch a break and so out we go, albeit with pride intact and a sense of wounded defiance which will hopefully serve them well in the next qualifying stage for the Euros.

But there's one only word to describe how the nation felt, indeed, still feels when we ponder that match.

And it's not printable in a national newspaper.

- Ian O'Doherty

Irish Independent