A daughter of the only woman to have "disappeared" at the hands of the IRA has welcomed the organisation's decision to identify the secret burial sites of about 12 people. Jean McConville, the mother of 10 children, was abducted on December 7th, 1972, from her home in Divis Flats and never seen again.
Her daughter, Mrs Helen McKendry, told The Irish Times yesterday that the recovery of her mother's body and a civilised funeral would make "an enormous difference" to her. "My life has been on hold from that day to this," she said.
Helen was 15 years old when her mother disappeared; her eldest sister, Anne (19), was mentally disabled and in hospital; her 17-year-old brother, Robert, was interned on the Maidstone ship at the time.
Mrs McConville, originally from east Belfast, was a 37-yearold widow of 10 months when she was kidnapped on December 6th from her home and held for a few hours before escaping. She returned to the four-bedroom flat in the Divis complex in west Belfast.
"At teatime the next day, she asked me to go to the shop. She was going to have a bath because she had been beaten the night before [during the first abduction]. Eight fellows and four girls dragged her from the bathroom at gunpoint," Helen recalls.
Her mother never returned from the second abduction. According to Helen, "everybody was terrified of everything" in the early 1970s and "the doors were closed" when it came to witnessing possibly incriminating events.
Helen understood from her mother that, during the first kidnapping, she was asked questions "about things she did not know". Sensing the danger was not over, Helen asked her mother to go to stay with her grandmother in east Belfast but Mrs McConville believed there was nothing to flee.
However, Helen takes the view now that the IRA was searching for a woman it believed was involved in the Four Square Laundry, a British undercover operation which was discovered by the IRA. Mrs McConville had also at ended to a wounded British soldier outside her front door that summer but her daughter is not sure if this incident was linked to her ultimate disappearance.
"We had only lived in Divis for two years and were strangers in the area. My mother had changed from Protestant to Catholic to marry my father," she says.
On the evening of Mrs McConville's abduction, Helen returned home to find here sisters and brothers "in hysterics". "We have learned since then that they put a plastic bag over her head and she suffocated. The last story we heard was she left a house in Belfast with four men. They came back five minutes later and she was not with them," she adds.
With the disappearance of her mother, the family broke up. Helen was now the eldest child in the home. The younger children went from orphanage to orphanage and now, as adults, they live all over the North. Her sister, Anne, died in 1992. "If my mother's body was found, it would bring us closer as a family. I try to keep in contact with them all," she says.
The recovery of Mrs McConville's body would assist her emotionally to come to terms with the terrible loss.