The world is a small place and with the advent of social media it appears to be shrinking ever faster. We were at home on Friday night when reports of what was happening in Paris began flashing up on the news channels. The images that filled our screens were not of online war games peopled by animated characters – they were the real thing. Real people out for a drink or a meal were being mown down by automatic gunfire.

Tens of thousands of soccer fans narrowly avoided a blood bath at one of Paris’s most iconic sports venues. Concert-goers were being shot dead, one by one, as the icy cool killers repeatedly reloaded, aimed and fired. There was no mercy.

We were glad to be so far away. And then we had a message from our son Richard. A young French man who had been on an Erasmus year with one of his friends was being held captive in the Bataclan theatre. He was on the first floor balcony pretending to be dead. His facebook posts were pleading for an immediate military and police assault on the theatre before everyone was dead. Suddenly, because of social media and the messages he was frantically sending to the wider world, we were brought straight into that theatre. We hung to the edge of our seats waiting for news of a young man we did not know but who was known to our son. Finally it came. “Alive. Just cuts. Carnage. Dead bodies everywhere.”

Citizens of 25 nationalities are listed among the dead and injured following this cruel attack. Innocents all. And for what? Is it to strike fear into the very heart of Europe and attack the freedom and way of life we take for granted? We may be far away but we are not immune to this terror. The brutal deaths of Larry and Martina Hayes from Athlone and Lorna Carty from Robinstown, Co Meath, on a Tunisian beach and the injuries and experiences of Irish citizens in Paris are testament to this.

I’ve always been thankful to be born at a time when the western world was a good and civilised place in which to live. Having a home, access to education, a fair judiciary and democratic government are freedoms that have been given to so few people over the generations and over the world. I have never taken these freedoms for granted. Over the past few weeks I have been reminded of the quotation of Martin Niemoller, a prominent German Lutheran pastor who opposed the Nazi regime. It has a resonance with events we now witness nightly on our TV screens.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.

Let that be a warning from history that all of us should heed.