Monageer: what should we tell our children? Marie Murraytries to chart a path for adults through a difficult landscape.
The deaths of the Dunne family in Monageer were a tragedy. The idea of an entire family - a young couple, tiny children - dead, needlessly dead, is an image not easily erased.
The description of how the children died and how their parents died evokes particularly upsetting imaginings of how that came about.
Media portrayals of the house, playthings in a garden, neighbours nearby, all lend a further unreality to events.
Photographs of the children in their parents' arms add a surreal dimension to the situation: how could such apparent happiness end so sadly? How could children held in their parents' arms die in their own home at the hands of a parent?
Tragedy has many layers. It affects most deeply those who are closest to it: immediate family, friends, neighbours, the wider community and the country as a whole. When personal tragedy becomes public there is private grief and public distress and discussion about what happened, how it happened, how it might have been prevented and the sequence of events that led up to it. Information emerges about who knew what and when they knew and what they did or did not do.
The inquisition on guilt begins. For when children die there is collective concern and vicarious communal remorse that life, as we live it, and family life as we support or undermine, stress, burden, invalidate or investigate it, does not protect our youngest, our most beautiful and vulnerable citizens: our children.
Children are the future. We should not outlive them. They should not die. While we can accept natural disasters we find it more difficult to come to terms with needless death. It alarms us.
But if we, as adults, are upset, what is the impact on our children of this story? What sense can they make of it? What questions and fears does it evoke in them?
For to the child who has been looking, listening, overhearing, half-attending, stealing glances at the TV screen, observing parental reactions, eavesdropping on adult conversations and engaging in the information gathering of childhood from which they construct their world, this is an alarming story.
The core of children's security is shattered if it seems that the one place of safety, the refuge in an uncertain world, the psychological sanctuary and place of protective parental love, can become a place of death at a parental hand.
In the child's eyes this is every frightening fairytale, every monstrous metamorphosis, every evil magic spell and every unimaginable nightmare.
There are many adults who may need to deal with their children's understanding or misunderstanding of what occurred in Monageer. Children do not always articulate their fears in ways that are immediately identifiable or visible. Adults can be unaware of the extent to which children absorb public tragedies, even when they have tried to protect them, because of how children often displace their anxiety and manifest it in unrecognisable ways.
The deaths of the Dunne children are of inevitably high resonance for children and, in an extraordinary way, seeking help from an adult means asking their parents the unaskable question: "Are children safe with their parents?"
This tragedy is psychologically complex. The paradox is that parents, who are the usual source of reassurance to children, are also cast as objects of suspicion in this tragic narrative of life and death.
The challenge for parents in a situation such as this is to find a sensitive, reassuring way to talk to their children about what happened. As parents know, the questions children will ask, or that adults will ask their children, will depend upon the emotional and intellectual age and stage of the child and what they have heard about the tragedy.
The golden rule is that children do not require information beyond their wish to know, yet it is equally important to make sure a child's apparent lack of interest is not obscuring worry.
Young children tend to express their anxiety in drawings or in their games, sometimes in new behaviours, night-time monster fears, tummy aches and pains and being more clinging, whingeing and uneasy. An extended, calm night-time routine and stories that are light with happy endings are helpful at this time.
For children who have specific questions, the most reassuring answers emphasise how sad and absolutely unusual this situation is. It helps to explain that the reason why people are so upset, why the story is in the news, is because it is so unusual.
It is not something that children need be afraid of.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and director of student counselling services at University College Dublin