All of DJ Carey's moments of genius now feel as insubstantial as a dust mote

EVEN the word itself - an accursed, terrifying C-word - seems infused with a heavy, buoyancy-stealing malignancy, a verbal concrete block that condemns hope to sleep with the fishes.

- BY ROY CURTIS

Six letters that have changed the trajectory of a billion lives, two syllables invested with the dark power to sink the most weightless spirit, a terrible sickness that DJ Carey repackaged as a weapon he then fired with inexplicably, cynical malevolence.

Carey has disgusted many not so much because he shamelessly mined the compassion of so many for financial reward, but because he deployed cancer as the drill bit to excavate their sympathy.

Because he made a cold, conscious, unfathomable decision to utilise the C-word as an ATM.

Whatever evil and terrifying force took hold of this latter day Cu Chulainn, bending and warping his humanity, it carried him into a desert of integrity, where he gouged lie after lie from the inhospitable soil.

Under the spell of something demented and rotten, he lost touch with that old sense of himself as a beloved national figure, and instead exploited for financial gain the universal fears about a disease which has the shattering of lives as its reason for being.

A nonexistent cancer became DJ's grotesque, personal cash machine.

In that moment a tumour that would dwarf any sliotar, one more diseased than any carcinogenic growth, a lump that cannot be zapped no matter how frequent or intense the treatment, attached itself to his reputation.

SHADOW