In the middle of last month, Abbeylara's footballers won the Longford Senior Football Championship, giving the small community a chance to celebrate.
Yesterday evening in the red-and-white bedecked village, it was clear the celebrations were at an end and that the spectre of the Holy Thursday killing of one of its native sons was uppermost in the minds of locals.
The bunting seemed out of kilter with the mood of locals, who were very unhappy with the outcome of the inquest, which took place in the county town about 20 miles away.
A man wheeling a bicycle near the huge handball alley where Mr Carthy spent many hours playing his favourite game made no bones about what he thought of the inquest.
"There will have to be a public inquiry into what went on there. We didn't get all the information," he said.
Like other locals, the man did not want to be named but he wanted to make his point, nevertheless.
In the privacy of their homes, away from the windswept street, the people were even more bitter, especially about the treatment meted out to the Carthy family.
"It was a terrible thing to say that his sister had drink taken," said one local woman who had kept all the daily papers to read the reports.
"I see a whole lot of things here that I am not satisfied about at all. There is a lot of contradictions in the evidence about a whole lot of things," she said.
A neighbour, who had dropped in after hearing the outcome of the verdict on the RTE television news, was highly critical of the jury's failure to add riders to their verdict.
"Sure we all know John Carthy was killed by the guards but we thought we would find out why. We still don't know," he said.
The local people are even more fully convinced now of the need for a public inquiry.
A man in a bar in nearby Granard said that people in the area will remain suspicious of what had happened until a public inquiry is held.
Eugene McGee, editor of the Longford Leader, had posed in his newspaper 10 questions on the circumstances surrounding the killing for which he sought answers. He said he felt the majority of the questions had been answered.
"We now know the basic things, like how many shots were fired and by whom, but there are crucial questions which came up during the inquest which still remain hanging," he said.
"There was quite a conflict of evidence in relation to a number of things and the newspaper will be supporting the call by the family for a public inquiry into the incident," he said.