Irish Examiner view: Hopefully McCanns can find closure

Fresh searches in Portugal this week for Madeleine McCann, who has been missing since 2007

Personnel at Barragem do Arade reservoir, in the Algave, Portugal, as searches begin on May 23 as part of the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Picture: Yui Mok/PA Wire

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.