My eldest son is a blond 11-year-old who likes to mess around on his bike. Every time Robert Holohan's name came on the radio or TV, I found my eyes involuntarily drawn to my son, greedily soaking in his everyday presence, for once not annoyed if he seemed surgically attached to a GameBoy or a PC, writes Breda O'Brien.
Like many other parents, I suspect, I could feel my mind start to shut down every time I began even tentatively to explore what it would be like to be the Holohan family, as endless hours stretched into endless days and nights. And when he was found, only crushing, unbearable pain.
The tsunami caused many to question how you could reconcile a loving God with catastrophic natural disaster.
Gardaí have announced a murder investigation in the case of Robert Holohan. While the tsunami caused people to focus on God's role in the world, the Holohan case raises an even more disturbing question - that of human evil.
Even those who have no belief in God use the word "evil", and acknowledge that human beings can descend to the depths of depravity.
Alice Thomas Ellis writes of a character in one of her novels who has just given birth, and so has "discovered the nature of unconditional love for the first time".
The killing of a child offends against one of our deepest instincts, that of protecting and sheltering, not just our own children, but those of others. What drove hundreds of people, not just from Cork, but the midlands and west, out in sheets of driving rain to search for Robert?
It was the voice of empathy in the human heart, the ability to identify with, no matter how inadequately, the pain experienced by parents, grandparents, siblings and all who loved Robert.
Painful as that is, it is even more difficult to enter imaginatively into the darkness which must surround someone who could kill a child.
Confronted with the problem of evil, we tend to have two reactions, both visible this week. The first is to distance ourselves, and to categorise those responsible as monsters and fiends.
It is far harder to face the possibility that a child-killer is neither monster nor fiend, but a human being, who has followed a twisted and convoluted road, who made choices all the way, which have led to the moment when committing an evil becomes easier than resisting it.
Whether Robert's abduction was planned or opportunistic scarcely matters. In either case, someone had explored in his or her mind, moved away from and moved towards, perhaps with a great deal of self-loathing, the possibility of taking and harming a child.
Although we focus on abduction by strangers, the fact that in most cases the person is someone known to the child only deepens the horror.
The second reaction is to state that all acts of that kind are the result of sickness. No one in their right mind could do such a thing. It is easier to characterise it as sickness, than to conceive of it as the result of repeated choices, some small, some greater, which progressively weaken the boundaries that prevent most people from even contemplating such an act.
There are rare cases where people kill or harm due to mental illness, but it would require a high degree of mental illness before someone could be completely cleared of guilt.
We are a society in love with "choice". Just listen to how often the word figures in advertising and everyday conversation. While some of that language is a welcome antidote to more repressive eras, our exaltation of it as a supreme value blinds us to the fact that there are such things as bad choices.
Our society recognises that there are crimes of passion when extreme emotions cause people to act in uncharacteristic ways. However, far more often, evil acts result from repeated rationalisations of bad choices.
A paedophile must deaden, over and over again, the compassion that would allow him or her to enter into the pain of the child, and instead persuades him or herself that it is the child's choice to participate.
The kind of self-hatred which paedophiles often experience shows that they know that their acts are abhorrent, but time and time again they allow themselves to sink into the quicksand of self-gratification. Each time it becomes easier.
Hannah Arendt wrote that the most frightening thing about evil is that it is, at one level, banal. People who step outside all the moral norms of society are not freaks, but like you and me, except that their choices are different.
There cannot be a sensitive human being who has not glimpsed the capacity for evil within themselves and been appalled by it. Far easier, though, to assign it to others, rather than deal with the fact that the potential for evil lives within each one of us.
As a society, we have to examine whether our collective values reinforce selfishness and immediate gratification, or the virtues of self-discipline.
In the darkness of last week, the only light was to be found in the sight of an extended community rallying around the family. Old-fashioned values of neighbourliness, faith and solidarity were evidence that the spirit of selfishness is not the only one abroad in our land.