Forty-five years is a long time to wait for anything. Yet the family of Joe Lynskey, missing since 1972, has not given up on finding his body. Neither has the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR), which has carried out extensive searches for Joe since the IRA admitted to his murder in 2010.
Two years ago there was hope when first one body and then another were found in a boggy area the size of eight football fields. But those remains belonged to two other missing men, Kieran McKee and Seamus Wright. Joe, a former Cistercian monk, remains one of four of the original 16 “Disappeared” – victims of republican paramilitary groups who were killed and secretly buried – who have yet to be found.
Yet hope remains. As I write this, the ICLVR has discovered the body of Seamus Ruddy, a young teacher from my hometown of Newry, killed by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in France in 1985.
Of the others who remain lost, Columba McVeigh was just 17 when he was taken. His last letter to his mother, written only days before, was signed “from your big son”. She died without knowing his fate. Robert Nairac, a British Army captain, had been infiltrating the IRA when he went missing. Despite the lack of a body, several men have been convicted of his murder.
The ICLVR will keep searching for the three, but there’s a growing awareness that time is running out. At the annual Mass for the Disappeared last month, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh renewed calls for people to come forward now. Memories are dimming. The recent death of Martin McGuinness is a reminder that those involved may no longer be with us.
The commission was set up in 1999 as part of the apparatus of the Good Friday Agreement intended to deal with the difficult issue of victims. In a province where former sworn enemies were governing together, and forgiveness was the order of the day, what could be done for those families still clamouring for answers? As with so many parts of that historic deal, a compromise was reached. The commission receives information and looks for bodies, but does not prosecute based on what it finds. Chief searcher Geoff Knupfer, who also led the hunt for victims of the Moors murderers, says: “We are not in the business of recovering truth. That is someone else’s job.”
The commission is a serious outfit, drawing on dog handlers, divers, geophysicists, retired police officers and even tree surgeons. Yet despite these resources the searches are often fruitless. Memories are perhaps failing after so many years and the landscape itself is changing. They searched for Jean McConville for years before her body was found by chance on a beach in Louth after a heavy storm.
McConville’s story has captured the public imagination, summing up the suffering which echoes on decades later. The widowed mother left behind 10 children when she was taken in 1972. The children watched, crying, as she was dragged from their flat in Belfast, still in her slippers. When she never came back they were separated, scattered to care homes.
Every family has a similar tale of pain, from the law-abiding farmer and father Charles Armstrong, abducted on his way to Mass; to Brendan Megraw, whose pregnant wife was injected with a sedative and tied up while his kidnappers struck. His body was finally found in 2014, after four searches spanning 15 years.
The families speak of their great relief at having the bodies returned to them after so long. This is the outcome that keeps the commission digging in bogs, searching through vast tracts of featureless land, attempting to find what has stayed hidden for so long. But others are waiting still.
We associate these disappearances with the 1970s, but they continued up to the mid-1980s in the case of Seamus Ruddy. What is less well known is that in the 1990s, as peace became a matter of when rather than if, they almost started up again. Reports suggest that Caroline Moreland, another single mother murdered in 1994, just weeks before the IRA ceasefire, was almost “disappeared” too. The IRA leadership are said to have eventually decided against burying her in a secret grave.
Some lists of the Disappeared also include a 17th victim, Gareth O’Connor, who went missing in 2003. His body was found two years later, dumped with his car in Newry Canal.
Northern Ireland has changed beyond recognition today, but the Disappeared are a constant reminder that peace has to be fought for, and that in brokering it so many families had to somehow find forgiveness, and live with their pain. The thorough and gruelling searches – such as the one just conducted in a remote forest in northern France – are one way of saying: we do not forget, and we will keep looking.
Claire McGowan is an author and senior lecturer in crime writing at City, University of London
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