The case of Madeleine McCann is capturing the hearts and minds of Irish parents, but there are harsh truths to deal with closer to home, writes Kate Holmquist.
A three-year-old girl vanishes from her holiday bed in a manufactured resort of dreams on the Algarve while her parents dine in a nearby tapas bar. Her desperate family appeal to her abductors on TV: "Please don't frighten her." Her attractive blonde mother becomes an overnight TV star and Madeleine soon has her own websites, with footage of her parents' press conferences played over and over again.
The disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann becomes an interactive multi-media reality soap opera turning on events in Praia da Luz.
For two weeks now, Sky News has streamed the story with "updates" that pump viewers' concern but don't say much and newspapers print sensational angles in order to develop the story in the name of "investigation", knowing that this is a tale that will sell their products. Because the story of "little Maddy" - as the tabloids call her, much to the chagrin of her parents - comes straight out of our deepest fears: a child snatched from her bed and spirited away, not by the bogeyman but the current equivalent, the paedophile, for which the bogeyman, the big bad wolf and Hansel and Gretel's witch were always metaphors.
The bard who once travelled door-to-door with frightening cautionary tales now lives with us full-time in the shape of the media.
As the blonde, blue-eyed Madeleine's fourth birthday passed with still no sign of her and her downloadable poster plastered in airports all over Europe, her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, became like actors in their own nightmare for public consumption.
Their performances are even "reviewed". The BBC praised their "handling of the media" while the UK's National Missing Person's Helpline stated that "the media strategy of the family has been a great success", as though instant media rapport is an essential skill that any parent pushed to the brink must have.
The story became so important in British consciousness that the prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, met Madeleine's aunt at Westminster. Meanwhile, the zealous media circus played Sherlock Holmes and targeted a "suspect", Robert Murat, whose father built the resort. Murat's estranged wife issued a statement that she was "cooperating" with police - her own life changed forever. Murat's friends and family were voluble in their defence of him, describing his desire to help, damning him with their praise - compelling twists in the plot.
In Ireland, we have been so affected by what is happening thousands of kilometres away that we parents have debated issues of trust and child safety. Madeleine seems to directly impinge on our realities, even though she doesn't. In the Liberties, Bertie Ahern ties a yellow ribbon at a local improvised shrine to "Maddie".
Who wouldn't be affected? But this is a story that has lost all proportion. Young children generally don't disappear in Ireland. They get murdered, sometimes by their parents; they are abused by parents and paedophiles who are usually trusted members of their families. An Irish child is hundreds of times more likely to be killed by a family member than by a stranger. For us, this is the true horror, but it's so much more difficult to contemplate because it isn't black and white, like a dark reality soap, and it isn't at the safe distance of Praia da Luz.
In Letterkenny this week, a 26-year-old mother and her seven-year-old daughter were found dead in their home in a disturbing re-run of a case in Wexford recently, where two parents were found dead with their two young children.
In the Co Donegal town, few of the neighbours seemed to know the mother and daughter, Catríona and Caitlín Innes, though a few knew them to see and gave her crisps or chocolate when she came singing at their doors.
Many of us don't know our neighbours any more, but we do know the people who appear on TV and they can be more real to us than the people who live next door. We're hard-wired to be seduced by story-telling and the media, understanding that story-telling is profitable and gives us what we want: "tragedies" that we can watch, dissect, endure, survive, in a strange reversal of the anonymity that being estranged from our neighbours brings.
The Madeleine case, with its "goodies" and "baddies" and just a smidgen of parental guilt, is a story we can identify with. What would we do in that situation? Have we ever left young children asleep in bed while we went out a few doors away for some couple-time? Isn't being on holiday with young children difficult and who wouldn't be tempted?
It's much easier to digest than the baffling situation of a young mother and daughter who seemed perfectly fine at the weekend but, a few days later, are dead.
"Little Maddie" is more real to us than the child who comes singing at the door because Madeleine has become a character in a long-running news-soap.
Madeleine's story hits home in a way that home doesn't.
