Raonaid Murray died a month ago. Flowers still mark the laneway where she was murdered, the bouquets tended by local people desperate to reclaim the place in her memory. All day, every day, people go about their business in the shopping centre where she worked, the same one Crimeline showed her leaving just hours before she died.
But night-time marks the way that life has changed.
Young men and boys are fearful. Tough lads who sang all the way home from a club or pub on a Friday night now pool their money for a cab, or phone their parents for a lift. It's not like them to be cautious: personal security is something only girls and wimps fret about, after all.
Not any more. Suspicion and mistrust have stung, as if for the first time. The murderer may be someone they all know.
Intimations of mortality apart, it's a parable of modern times. This long-time mixed community of Sallynoggin-GlasthuleDun Laoghaire was among the few areas left in Dublin where everyone knew each other, whether they were rich or poor. You could rely on its geography.
Now, girls who babysit for next-door neighbours ask them to wait while they climb over the fence to go five yards home. Lads of all classes aren't carousing in the early hours of weekend mornings any more.
And parents whose own adolescence was broken, if ever, by acquaintances' deaths in car crashes or motorbike accidents, find themselves extending to grown children the kind of surveillance usually confined to tots.
A generation has lost the age-old right to roam. It is the first time in Ireland that the young have been consistently restricted, their behaviour and independence now circumscribed by real or imagined needs to stay safe.
Natural, important urges to explore the world and learn it on their own terms come second to an overriding sense of peril which can't but teach them that the world is an unduly anxious place. Sound as the reasons for it may be, the survival of a vital stage in growing up may be at stake.
WE RISK producing a generation of battery children, as it's been termed; children who may not explore, take risks, discover for themselves and be courageous; children who are reared indoors; children whose lives must conform to wider social needs determined by time and money.
Fears for their safety contribute part of the syndrome, as parents and carers try to find a balance between blind faith and realistic trust. Yet when taken alongside economic and social pressures, the effect is to compromise the way that children are allowed to live.
Schedules, timetables, deadlines conspire to damage the ease of movement that children always could expect. The conflation of changing work and family practices with a swiftly moving social context is directly affecting child development. Children have to fit in, even when it is not in their interests to do so.
Taken with the fear of stranger danger that has marked this decade in particular, children face a world of narrowed horizons where faraway hills must no longer be desired. To learn such caution at so young an age is something most adults can't even imagine.
You need to wander. Tests on tiny children show they rarely go beyond a certain distance from their parents, hard as it is to believe. Scientists who have studied this phenomenon compare it to the habits of homing pigeons.
At that stage, a parent is like a fulcrum around which the world can be thrillingly explored: the safer you feel, the more steps outward you can afford to take. Growing up means learning how to wander confidently farther afield, and finding your own autonomous place somewhere out there.
This was the path to adulthood in Stone Age times, just as it was 10 years ago. If that path is now at a crossroads, how will children learn to become mature?
Young children need fairly intense levels of care and supervision, but teenagers formerly did not. One result of this battery syndrome is how the borders of childhood are being extended well beyond the age of consent.
People in their teens are infantilised in a way that never happened before, and subjected to levels of surveillance - good and bad - never practised before.
As far as consumerism goes, they are encouraged to behave like miniature adults, and some do so to extremes precisely because they are not adults yet. More clothes, more technology, more sex, if scare stories can be believed, which in turn frees adults alternately to demonise or patronise their behaviour just as the elders in pre-modern tribes always have.
NOSTALGIA won't help us to understand this uniquely contemporary process. Children, and their parents, had it rough in the past, too. A battery culture will produce battery citizens - and signs are that it may be doing so.
A currently introverted community spirit leaves contemporary children stranded like beached baby whales between the demise of the nuclear family, such as it ever was, and the rise of a wider societal commitment to caring for them.
A Cork child was chased down a main street last year by a man who raped her and no one intervened. Like the Raonaid Murray case, someone somewhere knows who did it, or strongly suspects who did, but has not come forward to help see that justice is done.
Parents and carers understandably respond by raising surveillance levels even further, yet the awful fact remains that you can never protect your child 24 hours of the day. If you try, you'll end up limiting them.
Fear is one thing, ignorance is another. Pa rents and carers have to take their children's security seriously, even if it means getting up at three in the morning to collect an adult of 20 from a party. But the broader implications of the end of free-range childhood are still to play for.
Young children cannot mature if they are not free to roam. Young people cannot finish growing up if they and we feel obliged to maintain them under adult surveillance at all times.
Battery children do belong to an urban age. Play dates, quality time, the paraphernalia of a segmented life come with that territory. Fewer children being born means more energy freed up to focus on the ones who exist, at least in theory, but at what cost?
The need for adventure is as strong as ever, in children of all backgrounds.
What has changed is that the scene for such adventures transfers to the likes of a computer box that can be safely explored in the fortress of the child's home.