On a remote hillside, a quarter of a mile inside the Irish Republic, diggers are scraping at peat in pouring rain.
Three yellow machines, bright against the dark bog.
There is no birdsong. The conifer forest has been felled. There is only the drone of the machines and the voices of investigators, labourers and forensic archaeologists watching the work.
“Imagine your final steps taken up here,” says Geoff Knupfer, the head of investigations for the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains – a tightknit team seeking the men and women the IRA “disappeared” during the Troubles.
“Your last view. It’s a dark, grim place.”
In nine days, the brave, new, peaceful Northern Ireland will host the G8 summit of world leaders at Lough Erne – while literally below the surface the country is still troubled.
Here, less than 30 miles from the summit venue, healing is still being hard-won through old-fashioned Irish toil on a peat bog.
Mr Knupfer, a retired detective chief superintendent, knows all about remote places.
He was the man who in the 1980s heard Myra Hindley’s confession to the Moors Murders, and led the search on Saddleworth Moor.
After Hindley told him she was prepared to show him “areas of interest to Ian Brady”, they found the body of 16-year-old Pauline Reade, although they never recovered 12-year-old Keith Bennett.
Now, Mr Knupfer’s team is searching Bragan Bog in the Republic’s County Monaghan for the body of Columba McVeigh, who was 17 when he went missing from Dublin on Halloween night in 1975.
He is one of 17 people acknowledged by paramilitaries as abducted, murdered and secretly buried during the Troubles.
Ten of the bodies have been found, with seven still to be discovered.
The IRA accused many of the victims of being informants, but their families ask why the bodies weren’t left at the border as a warning, like others accused of betrayal.
“There’s no peace process for me,” says Columba’s youngest brother, Oliver, at his home near Dungannon, 30 miles over the border.
“Execution was bad enough, but they buried them like dogs. Thousands have to accept they’ve lost loved ones in Northern Ireland, but thousands don’t have to accept what I’m going through.”
When Columba went missing, Oliver was 13. Now he is 51.
But he will not rest until he fulfils a promise to mum Vera who fought for decades to find and bury her son.
“My mum died six years ago this week,” Oliver says. “I promised her I’d carry on till it’s done. The people involved are the scum of the earth to me.”
For years a conspiracy of silence surrounded the Disappeared. Some families were threatened, others were strung along, even sent Christmas cards supposedly from their missing sons.
But in 1998, Margaret McKinney, who lost her son Brian in 1978, spoke so movingly to then US President Bill Clinton that he asked his Northern Ireland Special Envoy to help the families. Ten months later, the IRA issued a list of 10 names.
Oliver often relives that day. “It was Palm Sunday 1999,” he says.
“A man sat in my driveway in his car. He started reading a statement that contained Columba’s name. I told him to get off my property.”
With his voice rising, he adds: “The hardest thing I ever had to do was tell my mum.”
Armed and masked IRA gunmen give a show of strength at an Easter parade in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast Guns: IRA in Belfast during The Troubles
Columba had been Vera’s favourite, a happy-go-lucky teenager who took part in talent shows.
Recalling the moment he had to break the news to his mum that Columba had been executed and placed in an unmarked grave by the IRA, Oliver says: “I’ll never forget my mother’s words. She told me, ‘the bastards didn’t have the balls to come and tell me themselves’.”
Four searches for Columba have already taken place in Bragan Bog, but this time there is new detail from a well-placed source.
“We’ll find him if he is still here,” says Mr Knupfer.
It is a unique search party, set up by statute and paid for by North and South.
The team’s work never leads to arrests and they never ask a single question of the ex-paramilitaries helping them locate the bodies.
“We don’t even ask them their names,” Mr Knupfer says. “It’s recovery and repatriation, no questions asked. Evidence we recover is tainted. Even if we came across significant evidence we would be obliged by law to destroy it.”
The search team uses a mixture of hi-tech equipment and old-fashioned police work.
“It’s never been the case of X marks the spot,” says Jon Hill, a former senior Met police detective, now senior investigator for the Commission.
“We use geophysics, ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry, resistivity... We’re the best in the world at what we do.”
Still, the search team is battling near-impossible conditions. Difficult soil, disturbed earth, terrain that has changed dramatically in 30 years. The diggers have to work on mats and metal plates to avoid sinking into the bog.
“Peat is both alkaline and acid,” says Niamh McCullagh, 33, a forensic archaeologist from Cork. “If a body is in acid soil it could have eroded. If it’s in alkaline it could preserve it.”
IRA gunmen walk through a cheering crowd at an Easter Commemoration march and rally in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast in 1997 Sinister: IRA gunmen in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast in 1997 Photopress Belfast
The current team has been together since 2006 and has found four of the Disappeared.
Mr Knupfer says. “Finding someone is fantastic but there is always a sadness. You are giving a family the worst possible news. It takes away all hope of their loved one walking through the door again.”
Their work is full of contradictions. “Families often thank the people who have shown the bravery of providing information,” says Sandra Peake, from the WAVE Trauma Centre that works with the bereaved. “Even though they may also be thanking their loved one’s killer.”
In Columba’s last months alive, he was arrested and jailed after bullets were found in his house. Oliver believes they were planted by British intelligence.
After Columba was released, he went to stay in Dublin with his brother Eugene. “Then he went to the pub one night and never came back,” Oliver says.
Before mum Vera died, she received a call from a priest linked to the IRA.
Oliver says: “He said ‘the guy who buried your son is in a bad way – would you pray for him’?” Vera refused. “It was very hard for her. She was in torment,” Oliver says.
He shakes his head. “Even during World War Two, the British and the Germans gave time to lift their dead.
The paramilitaries put huge emphasis on their graves and getting their bodies back. The smallest piece of information, to them insignificant, could do it. It could be the final piece of the jigsaw.”
He has personally asked Martin McGuinness, the former IRA leader and now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, to find out where Columba is. “I am still waiting for a reply,” Oliver adds.
The cost to the families of the Disappeared goes on. In Belfast, I met Philomena McKee, whose brother Kevin McKee disappeared from the city in 1972 with Seamus Wright. Philomena’s mum lost her mind with grief.
“They should have taken her that same day,” Philomena says.
Because of the IRA, Philomena’s life has been blighted by anxiety and depression.
“It’s like you’re stuck and you can’t move forward,” she says.
“It’s as fresh in my mind as the day he went missing. Did they let him die before they put him in the hole?
"How much did they torture him? Did he know these were his last steps? Things flash through my head. It gives you panic attacks.
“When they find his body it will be like starting a new life for me. Until that coffin’s put down and Kevin’s in it, I won’t rest.”
On June 16, as the world’s eyes turn to Lough Erne, the diggers will go on peeling back the peat. “Once I go, my children will carry on,” Oliver McVeigh says – a sentiment repeated family by family.
While their relatives have breath, the irony is the Disappeared did not and never will disappear.
Saturday 8 June 2013
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/digging-ira-disappeared-moors-murders-1939410
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