If the golfers had lingered on in Saudi Arabia another seven weeks or so, they would have been around for the mass beheading of 37 men, most of whom were convicted on trumped-up terrorism charges thanks to confessions obtained using coercion and torture.

Most of those executed on April 23, 2019, had taken part in anti-government protests. According to the UN, three of them were minors at the time of sentencing. The bodies of two of the executed men were displayed in public, impaled on a pole as a warning.

Three months later, Lowry won the Open Championship and signed a three-year deal to take part in the Saudi International.

The Saudi International is sponsored and backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which makes worldwide commercial investments on behalf of the Saudi state and recently bought Newcastle United. Its chairman is crown prince Mohamed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia who is widely believed to have ordered Khashoggi’s murder.

PIF is the major agent of the state’s Vision 2030 project, which seeks to position the kingdom for a post-oil global economy. A key part of this process is using sport to polish the image of Saudi Arabia as a happening international destination and distract from all the torture and dismemberment — ‘sports-washing’, as it is known.

In short, next week a platoon of expensively hired PR men in natty slacks go to work for a murderous, repressive regime. They are compliant stooges shilling for a purse that the Washington Post, Khashoggi’s employer, described as “blood money”.

And our Shane is one of them. So, it’s only natural that some of us are a little disappointed. Others will concur with Lowry’s own reasoning that he is merely trying to “earn a living for myself and my family”. Shane, you see, with his career earnings topping €20m, is just an average Johnny Lunchpail who has to go where the work is.

To be fair, it’s not like he’s the only one. Many of the world’s top players will be there. Both the PGA and DP World Tours had to provide special dispensation for the plethora of stars taking part in a tournament which is part of a souped-up, Saudi-funded Asian Tour.

Bryson will be there. Phil and Dustin too. And Bubba. Sergio, Poults, Westy and Henrik. Xander Shauffele, Patrick Reed and Tony Finau. G-Mac will even be there. So why pick on poor Shane?

Thing is, Shane is one of them, but he is one of us too. Though he is in the tiny elite of a truly global sport, his appeal is in his apparent ordinariness. He is the Irish everyman. We look at Lowry and we don’t just see the talent and focus required to get where he is. We also see the GAA fan, the young man who likes the craic and a few pints and loves his family and doesn’t appear to take himself too seriously.

Rightly or wrongly, we see ourselves.

So, if he is one of us, let us try to understand his point of view. While we think of Lowry as a made man, he might see it differently. He will feel that, sitting at No. 49 in the world rankings, his position among the game’s highest echelon is a precarious one.

He is not Rory McIlroy, a habitué of the top 10 who refused to play in Saudi because of the “morality” of the situation. Lowry knows that he is in a scrap to maintain his status in the game. He might feel he needs to be single-minded. In the Saudi International, he sees not a sports-washing exercise, but a big-name field and the chance to earn crucial rankings points. He might feel he has no choice, that he can’t afford a conscience.

“At the end of the day, for me, I’m not a politician, I’m a professional golfer,” was how Lowry washed his hands of the matter last week, a line suspiciously identical to that trotted out by a number of Saudi-bound players, as if there is a PR crib sheet being passed around.

True, western governments have been playing footsie with the Saudis for decades, but trust golf to jump at an excuse to absolve itself from moral responsibility. There is something wearyingly inevitable about all this, the inexorable triumph of money over morality, as if every glib self-justification drowns out the cries of the repressed and suffering just a little more.

If we see ourselves in Lowry, maybe the most depressing thing about watching him tee it up in the Saudi International is the growing sense that we are all becoming stitched into this grubby tapestry.

Golf is far from alone on the gravy train. Formula One, soccer, horse racing, and boxing have all become entangled in PIF’s ambitious schemes. The current, incessant transfer speculation around Newcastle United is the latest front in the wider campaign.

And if you unpick Saudi Arabia from your sporting conscience, where do you stop?

With Abu Dhabi, whose proxy club dominates the Premier League? With China, whose brutal human rights abuses will be glossed over for next month’s Winter Olympics, which some observers are likening, in propaganda terms, to the Berlin Games of 1936? With Qatar, who will round off this annus horribilis of sports-washing with the World Cup, for whose grotesque folly so many migrant workers gave their lives?

For Irish people, Lowry embodies something real and authentic about our love of sport and sense of ourselves.

It’s right to give him a bit of a kicking over all this, but, as we consume this ever more tainted theatre, there remains the distinct feeling that we should also be kicking ourselves.