The coffin left in Faughart graveyard just on the Border north of Dundalk containing the remains of Eamonn Molloy was "very light", according to Garda sources at the scene yesterday. The skeletal remains of the young man from the Oldpark area of north Belfast had lain in a secret grave nearby since mid-1975 when he disappeared from his home.
The IRA, which abducted him, issued a statement last month saying he was one of its members who was "executed" because, the organisation claimed, he was an informant working for the RUC.
His family did not report their son's disappearance at the time, possibly hoping that he had deliberately disappeared and was "on the run" somewhere.
The precise details of his death may never be known other than that he was almost certainly abducted by other IRA members from Ardoyne and taken south to Dundalk where he was interrogated, then shot dead and buried late at night somewhere in the countryside just south of the Border in north Co Louth.
His family suffered a terrible double blow in one year in the mid-1970s. His brother, Anthony, who was 19, was shot dead by the Ulster Volunteer Force on June 30th that year.
Since then the Molloys have suffered their losses in silence. They did not, it appears, even know for sure that Eamonn had been killed by the IRA. The remains of eight other people killed in similar fashion to Eamonn Molloy are expected to be located this weekend. After months of quiet work by Government officials working with intermediaries, the IRA has given up the secrets of some, but not all, of the "disappeared", whose secret deaths have haunted the whole peace process.
It is hoped that over this weekend a total of nine bodies may be handed over. There are believed to be two double graves containing the bodies of four young men who disappeared in west Belfast in October 1972 and 1978.
The older of the two double graves contains the remains of Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright, teenage delinquents who were caught up in the world of intrigue between the IRA and the British security forces in the early part of the Troubles. Republican sources say an attempt was made to recruit and "infiltrate" Wright and McKee into the IRA in the early 1970s by a shadowy undercover British army unit whose job was to recruit and operate IRA informers.
From the outset this unit was involved in highly dubious activities and gave rise to many of the subsequent allegations of British army collusion with loyalist attacks in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. It has been acknowledged by both republican and security sources that McKee and Wright were simple, petty criminals who almost certainly never were members of the IRA but were caught up in a bigger conspiracy and who paid a terrible price for something of which they were entirely innocent. They were abducted by the IRA, brought to Dundalk, interrogated and killed.
A similar price was paid by John McClory (17) and Brian McKinney (22), two petty criminals from west Belfast who incurred the wrath of the local IRA. Despite IRA claims that the two were RUC agents, there are strong local suspicions that the two had simply run foul of local IRA people and were killed in a botched "punishment" shooting, then brought south of the Border and buried.
The weekend searches may also uncover the remains of Jean McConville, a 39-year-old widow who was snatched in front of her screaming young family in December 1972. A recent widow and mother of 10 children, Mrs McConville had committed the "crime", in republican eyes, of comforting a dying young British soldier who had been shot outside her home in the lower Falls. A local committee, of sorts, convicted her of the crime of collaboration and a few days before Christmas eight men and four women from the IRA called at her home and took her away. The eldest of the family, Helen aged 15, looked after the children until the social services arrived.
The family were separated and never came together again. Helen, who has held a terrible sense of loss since, led the movement on behalf of the other "disappeared" that eventually caused the IRA to agree to give up its secrets once legislation was in place for limited immunity concerning evidence uncovered in handing over the bodies. The long wait of some, but not all, of these families began to come to an end on Thursday evening when two Catholic priests, long-standing intermediaries between the IRA and the Government, were told that the locations of nine "disappeared" would be made known this weekend. The two priests were directed to Faughart graveyard at dawn yesterday morning to find, lying on the ground between two graves, the coffin which is believed to contain the remains of Eamonn Molloy.
By mid-afternoon the locations of two other bodies were also communicated to the priests and passed on to the authorities.
It emerged yesterday that the Belfast IRA, which was under the control of figures who now control both the military and political sides of the republican movement, decided to give up its secret dead but that the IRA in south Armagh decided not to disclose the whereabouts of its victims.
The south Armagh Provos had killed three local men and the British army officer, Capt Robert Nairac, and secreted their bodies in wooded, boggy land on the Cooley Peninsula. The three local men include 55-year-old Charles Armstrong who went missing in 1981 and Gerald Evans (24) who disappeared in March 1979.
Both lived in Crossmaglen. Both were kidnapped by the IRA, taken to a safe house in the Dundalk area, interrogated and then killed and buried. Another man, Sean Murphy (25), from south Armagh, was kidnapped as he drove to visit his girlfriend in hospital in Newry, killed and buried. There is also the riddle of what happened to Capt Nairac, who was uncovered by the IRA and shot. Capt Nairac's family have never stopped their search for their son's remains but the south Armagh IRA has refused to disclose their whereabouts.
One man who had some information about Capt Nairac's fate was Eamonn Collins, a local IRA member who turned against his former associates and wrote a remarkably frank book about the IRA.
He said other IRA men told him that Nairac's body was taken to a meat processing plant in Dundalk and "rendered" along with animal carcass parts for use as animal feed.
Collins's expose of the local IRA cost him his life when he was waylaid and beaten and stabbed to death by local IRA men in February this year.