Evil stalks the land behind a carefully cultivated veneer of civility

KERRY, wonderland of mountain pass and Atlantic cove, a kingdom whose beauty can be even more spellbinding than David Clifford making magic on a rectangle of summer grass, sings the most enchanting songs to the soul.

- ROY CURTIS

From the Conor Pass, standing sentinel over countless ancient acres of unwitnessed stillness, to the thunderous and hypnotic tidal boom of ocean meeting land at Inch Strand, it reminds the traveller how life is both inexpressibly trivial and momentous.

Dingle, a town so picture postcard perfect, a vision from a dream, is unrivalled at facilitating - even before you walk though the timeless doors of Dick Mack's or Curran's - the falling away of the years, the softening of stresses.

A drive through the eye-popping, rugged wilderness of Killarney National Park on a sunkissed morning, figuratively and metaphorically ascending upwards towards the heavens, amounts to a healing for the heart.

And then there's Kenmare, Neidín herself and her scent of mountain air, a triangle of busy streets at her epicentre, the bustle adding to rather than diminishing its allure. Pat Spillane's Templenoe and lovely Sneem in one direction, Moll's Gap in the other.

It is a town tens of thousands of Irish and overseas tourists will pass through over these next few summer months. But there is one local they will no longer encounter north-west.

That latter erly stretch of the N71, the one linking Kenmare to his farm hard by Moll's Gap, was as familiar to Michael Gaine as any place on earth.

The spent sun of Michael's existence, the harrowing news of a broken body recovered in fragments from a slurry pit on his land, the upgrading of the 56-year-old's disappearance to a homicide investigation, has reimagined that lovely, peaceful haven as a landscape disfigured by grief and bewilderment and uncomprehending anger.

Like Sophie Toscan Du Plantier, Raonaid Murray or Ashling Murphy, Gaine entered the public consciousness only through his grisly and barbaric leaving of this world.

His story, as abominable as it is random and dark, touches a raw national nerve.

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