While growing up in a small rural parish, the days when our youngest child felt about 10 feet tall were when she and a bunch of pals were left briefly "in charge" of the local shop, writes Kathy Sheridan.
One bright, sunny day while "in charge", they watched, mildly puzzled, as a couple of youths approaching the door began to pull their anorak hoods up around their faces.
Once inside, one of the pair produced what looked like a sawn-off shotgun and roared at the children to lie on the floor. The robbery took no more than a few minutes.
But it's not difficult to imagine the assault on the minds of a bunch of 10- to 13-year-old children as the youngest of them panicked and tried to run towards his friends amid the foul-mouthed screams of a shotgun-wielding thug.
Physically, they emerged unscathed; outsiders would have seen nothing to worry about.
Psychologically, it was a different matter. We watched the confidence drain steadily from our strong, self-possessed 13-year-old, who now saw herself as a coward and a failure.
There followed two years of nightmares and broken sleep.
Her once limitless horizons became confined to the nearest village.
The sight of young men in hoods or white trainers literally stopped her in her tracks. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an icon of invincible girlhood, became the person who, in her sense of powerlessness, she ached to be.
She had one advantage. She felt "in charge" of her story.
She was able to talk about it in trusted company at times of her choosing, and therefore came to understand the complexity of what was happening to her.
For myself, there was a sustained feeling of primeval rage and grief, which swiftly shifted its focus from the robbers (who were never apprehended), to anyone who might threaten the slow, heart-breaking, rebuilding of my child's sense of security.
It was that feeling that flooded back when I first read the report in the Star about the assault on Michael McDowell and Niamh Brennan's 14-year-old son.
Both the editor and reporter have robustly defended it as a news story, in the style of "it's news if even the son of the Minister for Justice isn't safe on the streets"
Where is the logic here? Has this Minister for Justice revealed a soft spot for violent thugs, thereby making his child a legitimate media target?
Has it ever been suggested that the child of the Minister for Justice should be any safer on the streets than anyone else?
Ministers' children are not supplied with their own personal bodyguards, so what made this child any different, in a news sense, from a journalist's child or a garda's?
His parents happened to be "names", that's all. Ergo, in the Star's skewed vision, the child was fair game; indeed, far from possessing the immunity from harm implied by being "even the son of the Minister for Justice", it seems he was entitled to even less protection than, say, a child of the Star's editor, Ger Colleran.
And so, to hell with the child's anonymity, and his basic right to regain a modicum of control over his own life, which, at bog minimum, means being able to reveal and talk about his trauma at a time and place of his choosing.
As for the identity of the person who meddled with a child's life by leaking his story to the Star, there is no evidence that it was a garda.
The child's mother - a formidably independent woman with a forensic brain and well-developed sense of public duty - seems convinced, however, that it was.
And while many balked at her husband's draconian proposals for loose-talking gardaí, it would be hard to argue with her stunningly honest statement, that "if it happened again, I have to say I would be reluctant to get the guards involved". So would I. But my child was lucky; I'm only a journalist.
The Star's source, she notes, did not give out the name of the four boys who "behaved badly. They did, however, give out our son's name. We were probably naïve at the time".
In which case, most of us are hopelessly naïve; we assume that basic decencies apply when it comes to injured children.
And the Star's response? "If Professor Brennan feels that the names of suspected attackers should be made available, then she should have a word with her husband - over breakfast, maybe."
In short, not only are those brave boyos prepared to toss a wounded child into the circulation wars in the name of "telling the truth", but they happily give the knife another twist by turning his mother's plea for common decency into something not even a defective brain cell could summon up.
When their wonderful world of certainties rebounds on them personally, as it surely will, I wish them all the kindness and decency they would wish for others.