THERE is a question that Josephine Pender finds almost impossible to answer Does she believe her daughter - missing for four months on Monday - is still alive?

"I can't see her being out there without contacting me," she says slowly, carefully. "People talk to us and I know they're talking about looking for a body... We're looking for Fiona.

So they keep hoping, although they've heard "nothing, absolutely nothing", since Fiona Pender disappeared on August 23rd.

The last person to see the 25-year-old was her boyfriend, John Thompson, as he left their flat on Church Street in Tullamore, Co Offaly, to go to work.

Josephine has bought a Christmas present for her daughter and another present for her second grandchild. Fiona was seven months pregnant and the baby was due on October 22nd. They didn't know if it is a boy or a girl.

The Penders put up the Christmas tree at home for their 13-year-old son, John. "If it wasn't for him we wouldn't bother."

Fiona's other brother, Mark was killed in a motorcycle accident last year. "Mark's death was desperate," Josephine says, "but at least we had him, and we could grieve for him and bury him. We can't grieve for Fi."

The picture released to the media showed Fiona in Clonmacnoise, squinting and smiling into the sunshine. This week the family gave gardai a second picture, one of Fiona's studio shots taken for her modelling portfolio. "People have said it's more like the girl they knew."

Josephine says she was very close to her daughter. They talked every day and everyone was looking forward to the birth of the baby. Fiona had bought baby clothes and she and John were planning to build a house on his parents' farm.

"We feel helpless now. We don't know where to look any more. Some days you just get through, hour to hour, and sometimes you feel like you just can't get out of bed... Some days I cry all day and other days I can't cry."

The Garda has been helpful and almost every day there is a report of a sighting. But Fiona has simply vanished. Josephine believes her daughter would never have gone anywhere without telling them or preparing for a trip. "She's very organised. She would have packed her make-up and cleansers and deodorants and stuff."

In Casement Park Bray, there is also a present, wrapped and under the tree, for Siobhan Murphy (32). She has been missing for just over a week. She left home at 3.15 p.m. on Friday to collect her Peugeot 106 from the DART car-park.

"She said she was going for her car and I asked her to bring back the paper," says her mother Ann. At first, they thought she was carrying her handbag but they found it in her room afterwards. Her wallet and car keys were inside.

Siobhan had been staying with her family for two weeks while she did a CERT course in Dublin. She has worked as a chef in a Donegal hotel for 12 years. On Friday, she told her mother that she wasn't finishing the course. "She was a bit stressed out about it." She came back from Dublin, without picking up her car and lay down for a couple of hours, her mother says.

Siobhan was looking forward to Christmas and the arrival of her sister, brother-in-law and godchild from England that evening.

"We've gone out at night.

We've gone out early in the morning looking for her. Siobhan is very responsible. She wouldn't put us through anything like this."

Gardai have had reports of a number of sightings. And the searching is going on in shifts, with family, neighbours and Civil Defence involved.

John and Danny Curran have been driving frantically around Dublin for the last two weeks searching for their brother, Patrick (29). Yesterday divers searched the Liffey under O'Connell Bridge and the Ha'penny Bridge. Patrick hasn't been seen since the early hours of Sunday, December 8th, when he left the pub Break for the Border after a stag night. He walked out without his leather jacket.

His two brothers and at least five cousins have come from Kerry to try and pick him out from the thousands of Christmas shoppers on the streets between the bar and his home in Drumcondra.

"It's looking very serious now," John said yesterday, on his way to talk to the divers looking for his brother's body. Neither Patrick's passport nor his bank account has been touched since he disappeared. There have been "a few bits and pieces" reports of sightings, but nothing concrete.

Down in Kilkenny, Mary Phelan has collected 6,000 signatures on her own petition to have the gardai search a 20-mile radius around the village of Moone. She wants them to find the body of her sister, Josephine Dullard, who went missing while hitching home on November 9th 1995.

"We would bring home Jo and lay her to rest beside Mam and Dad," her parents' plot in St Kieran's cemetery in Kilkenny. She says the petition has been sent to every county and will be presented to politicians in early February.

"I often think if Jo was here now she would have her exams done and she'd be a beautician. That's why she had the two part-time jobs. She'd be here now and she'd be putting up the decorations. She loved Christmas."

The Pender family contacted the Missing Persons Bureau in Britain, and Fiona's photograph has been put out on the Internet, and teletext and shown on cable television. There is no such bureau in Ireland. Last month, the Big Issues Social Initiative set up a freephone number.

The co-ordinator of the help-line, Jenny Doyle, says the first piece of advice she gives is that people should calm down and look after themselves while they search for a missing person.

"People end up running themselves ragged and putting their life on hold. They tend not to think about themselves. That takes a lot out of them. And it takes a while before they can become more clear-headed."

The helpline takes between two and 10 calls a day, mostly from friends and family of people who have gone missing.