FIVE years on from Saipan and it seems that most of the scars have healed. Mick and Roy have shaken hands, Roy and Niall now work together, and Johnny is on speaking terms with Eamon again. All is right in the world. Which makes it a good time to look back at the levels of insanity the country reached as the contretemps in the Pacific played out just prior to the 2002 World Cup.

Red Mist, written and directed by Eamon Little, is a charming documentary chronicling the whole affair, but watching it is a little like hazily remembering a drunken night out . . . you can laugh at the various shenanigans, but occasionally you'll feel a little bit embarrassed. What were we like?

A whole week when sport moved from the back pages to the front, when Roy and Mick led off every TV and radio news bulletin. And then there were the phone-in shows, offering the pulpit to a country suddenly full of crazed evangelists, half of whom wanted Keane crucified, half of whom wanted him deified.

There was no sitting on the fence, people were either buying Cameroon jerseys or burning Keane effigies. Many who had previously had no interest in sport were rapt, a fact borne out when more people watched Tommie Gorman's interview/soap opera than tuned in for any of Ireland's group games in the tournament.

As Marian Finucane points out in the documentary, "The word treason was used. Had we all lost the plot? We [her radio show] got more contact on this, of people's hurt and rage and anger and sadness and mourning than we did following 9/11. I mean, can you believe that? I wondered if we maybe all hadn't lost our sense of priorities just a little bit." When Marian, never shy about being shrill, is the voice of reason you start to worry.

Thankfully though Red Mist still avoids tipping over into melodrama by using Conor O'Callaghan's brilliant book Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Irish World Cup Blues to provide its framework.

That book, which initially appeared with the altogether more fitting sub-title Roy Keane and the Football Civil War, was a fan's account of getting caught up in the whole farrago. O'Callaghan, a staunch Keane supporter, traces the week and how it affected him and therefore those around him, be it the various people he argued with, the wife he exasperated or the son dragged along in the slipstream of his father's vagaries. For all the reams that have been written about Saipan this book comes closest to capturing the mood of the average man in the street during that bizarre time, and does it in a terrifically witty manner.

While Red Mist in the main takes the style of a standard documentary, O'Callaghan's trials and tribulations are presented in animated form, as are certain incidents that happened behind closed doors, such as Roy's tirade at Mick (voiced by Gift Roy himself, Mario Rosenstock), and these interludes effectively puncture any pomposity that creeps through.

There are interviews with people who were in Saipan at the time, with hotel manager Michael von Siebenthal helping to recreate Keane's car trip from the Hyatt Regency Hotel to Saipan Airport, and local man John White telling of how he was watching Ireland train one day when his son asked him, "What's a f**king bollocks?" A shocked White asked where he had heard that, and his son replied, "Roy Keane just called one of the other players a f**king bollocks."

But the documentary makers recognise that as the week progressed the argument moved from Saipan to home, and even stopped being about sport, as soccer just became the vehicle for carrying a bigger argument about character and loyalty. Which is where another of the documentary's clever wheezes comes into play as media studies lecturer Marcus Free breaks down some of the exchanges that took place at the time.

When Dunphy is a guest on The Gerry Ryan Show, Ryan opens with, "Do you know what I smell Eamon? I smell amateur riflemen lining up to shoot the finest buck male in the herd, " and from there the two conjure up other inherently masculine images in an attempt to show they are on the same side as Keane, who they see as the alpha male in the dispute. The side chosen by people in the argument and their reasons for doing so said more about themselves than it did about Keane or McCarthy.

Red Mist isn't going to end all debates or even tell us anything new (most of the anecdotes from Saipan appeared in April's Mad About Sport when Paul Howard visited the island) but it's very entertaining, providing you're able to look back at anger and realise how stupid we all were.