Yet, like Philly McMahon with Ballymun, Harrington always stresses how important local community spirit has been to her. Few Irish Olympians are so keen to stress their pride in their roots. That’s significant because voices from the North Inner City are rarely afforded much opportunity to speak up for it.

Coming from one of the country’s most politically neglected and economically marginalised areas brought its own challenges for Harrington. She’s spoken herself about how boxing helped her to keep out of trouble as a teenager. Life can be tough around Portland Row.

So there was something wonderful about seeing it become the centre of the Irish sporting world this weekend. For once Croke Park seemed to be living in the shadow of the surrounding streets.

If we rarely hear from the people of Inner City Dublin, we hear even less from Ireland’s low-paid workers. Of late there’s been an avalanche of interviews with hoteliers, restaurateurs, publicans and their representatives complaining about the effect of lockdown on their businesses.

Yet there’s been an almost complete absence of interviews with the people who do most of the work in the hospitality sector. The only time low-paid workers are mentioned is when some businessman expresses the fear that the PUP might have discouraged them from doing the job for half nothing.

The most ignored cohort of a generally ignored group may be the nation’s cleaners.

They do an important job. Society could not function without them whereas it would get on absolutely fine without sports columnists. That cleaners are paid only a small fraction of the money pulled in by PR consultants, brand managers, social media influencers et al has no connection with the actual value of their work.

Kellie Harrington is a cleaner. In St Vincent’s Psychiatric Hospital, Fairview. In this sense too she represents an often ignored world. After the Olympics, she says, “I’ll be doing my restricted movements or whatever I have to and then I’ll be straight back into work because that’s who I am as a person and that’s the way I roll.”

It’s no coincidence that boxing gave Harrington her big break. It’s always been Ireland’s most egalitarian sport.

The sport extended a unique welcome to Travellers. It enabled Francie Barrett to make history at the Olympics and in doing so challenge the longest standing and most vicious form of prejudice in this country.

Boxing continues to do sterling work in communities where finding kids something to do which keeps them off the streets may turn out to be a matter of life and death. It battles against the odds to do so.

This weekend, for example, it emerged that the club in Buckingham Street where Harrington began her career has no toilet facilities for girls and is having to turn away new members because of a lack of funding.

If that story sounds familiar it’s because the same problem came to light at Katie Taylor’s club after the Bray woman won Olympic gold nine years ago. Imagine the problems at the clubs who don’t have an alumnus famous enough to earn headlines.

Adding insult to injury, after our underperformance in the 2016 Olympics, the Billy Walsh saga and the departure of big names to the professional ranks, the general sporting public fell out of love with Irish amateur boxing. No-one wanted to know anymore.

Yet the grassroots work continued and small Irish clubs continued to produce youngsters who triumphed at international level. They didn’t have the luxury of giving up.

Then came Kellie Harrington. In 2016, her surprise world silver medal got kind of lost in the Olympic build-up. Two years later when she won world gold in New Delhi it was clear a possible heir to Katie Taylor had arrived.

Harrington had spent years in Taylor’s shadow until, with the great champion gone, she suddenly emerged on the international stage like Athena bursting fully armed from the forehead of Zeus.

The stories of both fighters are very different.

Taylor was a phenomenal natural athlete who could easily have enjoyed a career in professional soccer and who won her first world title at the age of 20. Harrington was 28 when she won in New Delhi and 31 going into her first Olympics.

Whereas Taylor outclassed and overwhelmed most of her opponents, Harrington outfoxes them. Her diligence and intelligence call to mind our other boxing gold medallist Michael Carruth. She’s a grafter rather than a shooting star.

She is also a gay woman in a country which was for far too long a cold house for both gay people and women.

And someone who two years ago auctioned off one of her championship belts to help a neighbouring family whose house had burned down.

Underpinning it all is a kind of low-key modesty which once seemed typically Irish before we took to boastfulness like a duck to water during the Tiger era. Harrington’s utter lack of self-importance, egotism or self-pity may be the most impressive thing about her.

She’s a reminder too of all the untapped talent that goes to waste in an unequal society which writes off citizens for being born in the wrong place or inhabiting the wrong wage bracket.

How many potential Kellie Harringtons were lost to misfortune and despair before we ever got to know them? How many more will be?

The answer to the first question is ‘too many.’ The answer to the second depends on us.