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WHAT WOULD Albert Camus have made of Thierry Henry’s handball, asks Ruadhán Mac Cormaic

 With what pithy soundbyte would he, a one-time college team goalkeeper who claimed football taught him everything he knew about morality, have encapsulated last week’s clash between the Irish penchant for martyred indignation and the modern French propensity for self-flagellation? What would he have deemed the appropriate moral response to an unmerited win achieved by sleight of hand? Where would he have stood on video evidence? As it happened, the late writer, philosopher and Nobel laureate did return to the news pages last week. But not even the revelation that Nicolas Sarkozy hopes to disinter Camus’s remains and transfer them to the Panthéon – the Parisian mausoleum where great Frenchmen are buried – could dislodge the saga of last week’s France-Ireland match from the public mind. We may not know what Camus would have thought about it, but we do have the benefit of a great many living French philosophers’ reactions, because for three or four days they, along with every politician and pundit in France, expounded on little else.