The abduction and murder of the two girls ranks Soham along with Lockerbie, Hungerford and Dunblane, hitherto-unknown sites of horrific events, and represents the repulsive tolerance of the casual maltreatment of children.
Scores of deaths in flooded Europe; the approach of the first anniversary of September 11th; allegations of grade inflation in second-level state exams in Ireland and England; the possible re-introduction of university fees; Roy Keane and Eamon Dunphy soaking in hot water of their own heating - these stories comprised an unseasonably rich agenda as the media's putative "silly season" slouched towards the end of a summer that never really was.
All of them, however, were eclipsed by the horrors of Soham. The drownings in Europe were a natural disaster. The September 11th anniversary is still a few weeks away. Education wrangles are important, but the middle-class bias built into the system will prevail anyway. The Keane and Dunphy stuff can be engaging but ultimately is too frivolous to matter greatly. It was Soham that reached the parts of the psyche the other stories couldn't reach. It was Soham that provided the real chill of this wretched summer.
The abduction of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman ran as a story of images. From the outset, its images led bulletins and featured on front pages. Even though progress in solving the mystery was agonisingly slow, the dark depths of the psyche it reached ensured that, for weeks, it would remain the dominant news story. The dominant image was, of course, the final, unbearably poignant photograph of the little pair in their Manchester United replica jerseys.
How many times did Sky News, for instance, screen that image throughout the days of undulating but inexorably deepening foreboding? Hundreds certainly, given the number of bulletins per day and the number of days. Then the reconstruction of the girls' last known journey showed them to be, like hundreds of thousands of other young girls, Beckham fans. Thus, even the defining photograph became strangely enhanced - simultaneously more real and more fabricated - by simulating it as a three-dimensional action replay.
There were other images too. East Anglia is among the least-known parts of England to Irish people. We know it's flat, remarkably flat, and its main urban areas are Norwich and Ipswich - neither, in fairness, a tourist magnet. There's Cambridge, which is worth seeing as a prime example of the paradoxical combination of beauty and parasitism. There's Newmarket, known to racing punters and there's Harwich and Felixstowe with their ferries to Europe, especially Scandinavia. But, by and large, East Anglia is a part of England that Irish people do not reach.
Soham, with its church tower, community centre and long, somnolent main street is one of hundreds of similar English towns. Too small and frankly, too East Anglian, to have a team in the Football League, few of us had even heard of it. I hadn't anyway. Nonetheless, television revealed it as broadly, if not individually recognisable - a quintessentially English town. Fewer than 8,700 people live there. Even our small Republic has about 30 bigger urban centres. In England, Soham is merely an outsized village.
Now its name will rank with Hungerford and Dunblane and Lockerbie as hitherto little-known British sites of horror. Few would welcome a posting there. The town's name has become a synonym for unspeakable fears. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley operated around Manchester, James Bulger was murdered in Liverpool, Fred and Rosemary West lived and killed in Gloucester and London is so big it can always absorb its horrors, even if a district such as rebuilt Whitechapel retains eternal echoes from its grisly past.
Such large places are known for more than hideous murder. Soham is not. We've all seen and read heinous stories with child victims in the past. African famines, the disaster at Aberfan, the glut of child-abuse scandals here, the gauntlet of hate at Ardoyne's Holy Cross School, as well as the demonic murders of children. All these rake the psyche in ways that crimes against adults seldom do. The sheer hideousness of trust abused and innocence violated at once repels and demeans us.
No criminal, though many may kill and damage far greater numbers of people, disgusts us as much as a paedophile does. Prison inmates, many of them people de-sensitised by actions done to them and acts they have done, legendarily despise paedophiles. The term covers a wide range, of course, but so odious is it to most people that few differentiate between a creep who exposes himself before running away and those sociopathic paedophiles who abduct, torture and murder.
Indeed, the perversion is so revolting that creeps who expose themselves are automatically considered capable of raping and murdering children. No doubt some are.
Then there's the notoriously low rate of therapists' success with acute paedophiles. Their dark urges appear to be super-resilient. Experts have regularly reported that such people seem to live in a parallel world, in which they are either incapable of understanding their own vileness or are blithely determined to proceed anyway.
Ray Wyre, an expert who has studied the subject for 30 years, recounts a conversation he had with paedophile Robert Black, who abused and killed three little girls. Wyre asked Black how parents could best prevent him doing what he did. Black replied that children would have to be chained to the mother but added that even then, he would probably take the mother as well. Sure, there may well be contemptuous bluster in all that. Equally, however, there's a sense of an utterly unappeasable urge controlling the paedophile.
If that is the case, then attempts at rehabilitation must be practically Sisyphean in their futility. Perhaps sexual orientation is such a fundamental aspect of a human being that it is almost immutable. Yet rehabilitation must still be attempted because the alternative is worse. A refusal to try to understand what drives such malevolence will not make it go away and victims will continue to pay with, at best, blighted lives and, at worst, life itself.
Media coverage of the story has attracted critical attention. Certainly, in this age of 24-hour, live television news coverage, the horror of Soham was the most continually reported story of its type in Britain. The demands of news to drive the story unceasingly forward must have clashed with the demands of policing not to reveal everything. None the less, the police clearly decided to use the media as an unprecedented conspicuous aid in solving the case.
The rewards offered by salacious newspapers, most notably the £1 million sterling by the Daily Express, always seemed to have more to do with circulation than crime-busting. But frankly, who's surprised? The lure of loot, it seems, encouraged people to provide pointless "information" which effectively drained police resources. When a review of the handling of the investigation is eventually undertaken, the relationship between the police and the media may require serious reconsideration.
Still, that's for the future and the future is always desecrated by the violation and murder of children. Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman lived brief but, it would appear, largely happy lives. Their abduction and murder was so horrific and became such a huge news story that it's tempting to see it in terms of "evil" stalking the humdrum fenlands of England. It might, however, be more fruitful to recognise it as the repulsively gruesome end of a continuum that tolerates the casual and routine maltreatment of children.