Memories are short. So media outlets that one week could condemn America's "God and guns" culture as the rational explanation for a slaughter can the following week simply emote about the grim end met by an entire family in Monageer, Co Wex fo rd .

Politicians can't keep themselves from weighing in.

Some even set themselves up as spokespersons, it seems, for the family of one of the dead, and condemn the "gutter press" for focusing on the story in the same breath without any apparent sense of contradiction.

While there might be some validity in asking whether what many might see as odd requests to pay tribute in death to a favoured English Premiership football club was really a three-day story in newspapers of a certain size, it is folly to suggest that the public at large doesn't have a legitimate interest in the story.

The fact that gardai, after being tipped off by an undertaker that a man was inquiring about funeral arrangements for children still very much alive, outsourced the job of investigating to a local priest, is alone worth a very serious examination. How is it that the state can, in 2007, so heavily rely on the church as to outsource its responsibility to protect innocent life from imminent harm?

What the role of the state can and should be in situations that may require intervening into difficult family circumstances is a discussion that clearly needs to take place. Relying on the local priest to sort it out, no matter how well intended he may be, simply can't be good enough.

What should the role of the media be in such cases?

Carriers for quick conclusions about tragedies far away but shying away from asking hard questions about preventable deaths in our midst? Is it wrong to ask difficult and sometimes unpleasant questions about cases like this one, or better simply to don a warm blanket of mawkishness?

Unfortunately we already have an answer to that question.

Wednesday night saw hundreds crowd into St Mary's church in Monageer for a memorial service.

Prayers were sung and a woman spoke about the community's numb disbelief at the horror that had happened in the house next door. Dora the Explorer dolls, CDs, football jerseys . . . the grave goods of the modern age, perhaps . . .

brought up in offering to the local priest.

On Morning Ireland the following day, the audio package brought the sound of children singing the prayers of the faithful followed by the woman speaking. Then something strange happened. Fading up underneath the sound of a woman talking came music.

The music of those same children and their sung prayers. While the woman was still talking.

I'm pretty sure that while I may have been in a church on the South Side of Chicago or up in Harlem where the choir sung low underneath while a preacher made his points, I've never been in a Catholic church where the choir director started the songs while someone spoke from the altar. Which can only mean that someone in RTE decided that recordings from the memorial service for the Dunne family were not, in and of itself, sufficiently emotional an event to actually hold the listener's attention, like an editor of a tearjerker of a film. The music had to be edited in and brought up to tug at the heartstrings, because we find the reality insufficiently cathartic?

We live in a sufficiently media-savvy age that we are self-conscious when we know the camera is rolling. We are not ourselves. Now that most of us carry around a cameraphone in our pocket we are, potentially, on camera all the time. And once captured in that way, our performance can even be edited with effects to add some emotional punch.

Is reality, so edited, less true? The family is still dead.

The emotions are still real, if artificially heightened. But surely all this tweaking, to make sure we get our tragedy fix, deadens our desire for answers to questions about the real-world things we can actually do something about.