Irish Examiner view: Hopefully McCanns can find closure
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Readers may not immediately recall where they were in 2007, though a few handy milestones and markers can help to specify the obsessions of the time.
It was a year before Barack Obama was elected US president, for instance. Twitter was an obscure start-up, so small in scale that there were a few thousand messages a day on the site in total. The failure of companies such as Bear Stearns in the US were harbingers of the global financial crisis which would soon cause havoc on these shores.
The reason for this flashback? Yesterday there were fresh searches in Portugal for Madeleine McCann, who has been missing since that year. She has never been found.
Though her disappearance was headline news at the time, and has returned to the public consciousness occasionally since then, most of us probably associate it with that summer almost two decades ago. The circumstances of her disappearance — she was taken from the family’s hotel room in a popular tourist resort while her parents dined nearby —were so recognisable that the situation carried even more resonance.
This week’s developments reminded us that one family remains locked in unimaginable horror, still seeking closure 16 years later. It is to be hoped the McCanns can find that closure.