The searches began with shovels and wheelbarrows and confident talk of the week being dominated by funerals. A harrowing week to be sure but one which would finally bring closure of a kind to eight grieving families broken by nearly 30 years of lies and evasion.The confidence seemed well placed. There was the coffin of 21-year-old Eamon Molloy, delivered overnight to a misty cemetery outside Dundalk. There was the little yellow flag pin-pointing a dot on the bleak Co Wicklow hillside at Lacken. There was the precise detail of a specific bay in the beachside car park in Co Louth.With the benefit of hindsight, any such optimism was foolish. A glance at the remaining locations revealed to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains exposed the "pinpointing" for what it was: a 400 sq m expanse in Oristown, Co Meath; 100 sq m at Wilkinstown, Co Meath; 100m by 30m near Emyvale, Co Monaghan; 30 sq m at Colgagh, Co Monaghan.Nor was the outlandish process by which the IRA led commission members to define site boundaries particularly encouraging. At one remote location, they were directed to a marshy expanse where the first clue would be the tree with the broken branch; from there, they were to take a specified number of steps across the boggy waste, then look for another tree with a broken branch . . .The fact that none of these trees is old enough to have been available as a landmark all those years ago, when such dirty work was doubtless carried out in darkness, in speed and some panic, points up the difficulties faced by the searchers.That the original information, vague as it was, may have been recycled three, four and even five times before reaching the men on the ground hardly inspires confidence either.By Thursday, scepticism was building. At Colgagh, even while 50,000 gallons of water a day were being pumped away from the alleged burial site of 18-year-old John McClory and 22-year-old Brian McKinney, and inch-thick slices of dark, sticky peat were being sheared off and painstakingly sifted by up to 20 gardai working 12-hour shifts, their colleagues were out interviewing locals about the possibility of confusion with other bogs in the same townland.In its unsettling silence and desolation, Colgagh is similar to the sites at Emyvale and Lacken - half a mile up a track, itself nearly a mile off a slightly wider lane, which is off a single lane road, off another minor county road (often festooned with Sinn Fein election posters) leading to a remote village. Never mind the fact that with tree-planting, reclamation and excavation in some cases, the terrain has changed almost beyond recognition in 30 years or that - as in the Templetown Beach site - farmers had been burying animal carcases there up to fairly recent times; simply distinguishing the correct lane out of dozens leading off the correct minor road is a challenge to begin with, even for locals, never mind the dimmed memories of "visitors" to the area a quarter of a century ago.When they arrived at Bragan near Emyvale, on Sunday, Garda searchers found the forest track to the alleged burial site of teenager Columba McVeigh, murdered in 1975, virtually impassable. The three-quarter acre site on a mountainy bog, last worked 20 years ago, could only be accessed by foot. It took all day Monday to lay a track and drain the site.
The fact that, although only a fraction of the site had been sifted by Thursday, men had begun to dig outside the site perimeter demonstrated how they were already hedging their bets.On all the sites, initial high confidence ebbed by the hour as the shovels were replaced with small mechanical diggers which in turn were swapped for larger models and the trenches grew to the size of swimming pools.
The introduction of sniffer dogs, metal detectors and ground penetrating radar equipment heralded a certain desperation. "Our instructions are to keep digging for as long as it takes," they repeated doggedly.They repeated this mantra in the driving rain on Wednesday, as they shielded miserable little family groups who stood looking on as huge diggers scooped up slices of earth, any of which could reveal something of the humanity that was once a beloved brother, son or mother.In the wildernesses of Colgagh and Oristown, a few bouquets of flowers left in the branches of a tree or on the ground served as a poignant reminder of what these desolate trenches signified to those left behind. The brokenness of these people was epitomised this week by 68year-old Mrs Margaret McKinney, the mother of Brian who, with his 18-year-old friend John McClory, was murdered in 1978 for stealing weapons from the IRA. She described the times when she got into his bed and held his clothes, crying herself to sleep wondering where he was buried. The savage loss for these families was further exacerbated over the years by wilful misrepresentation. The McKinneys were told at different times that their son was in England or Mexico while the children of Jean McConville were told she had run away with a UDA man, or a British soldier or even several soldiers. At one stage they were even given a name and address where she was supposed to be living in Australia.The problem for the younger of her nine surviving children is that while they were growing up in different children's homes they came to believe this.But the agony continues. For these families, it seems scarcely believable that their loved ones lie here, so remote, so far south. Jean McConville's eldest daughter, Helen, and her husband, Seamus McKendry - who between them founded the action group Families of the Disappeared - firmly believed John McClory and Brian McKinney were buried under a housing estate in west Belfast. "This guy pointed out the spot to me," Seamus says positively. "I know that guy was involved. Everyone knows he was involved." Yet suddenly, according to the IRA, they lie somewhere entirely different.Similarly, just a week ago, they believed Jean McConville was buried in a shallow grave, near a cluster of houses in the Beechmount area of west Belfast.
Meanwhile, locals around Old Faughert cemetery talked of hearing helicopter activity in the area the night Eamon Molloy's body was transported there.However unlikely it seems, some wonder now if others might have been spirited out of the North in some fashion.If the families of the disappeared are suffering the fallout of years of cover- ups, misinformation and guilt, this, in a more muted sense, could be said to characterise public feeling in the south this week. People prepared to talk, do so in whispers, clearly disturbed that the ugly, brutal truth of the Troubles is landing on their doorsteps. Others refuse to talk at all, because - as one put it - who knows what their neighbours were up to 25 or 30 years ago?Locals near the sites in Co Meath are far from anxious to discuss the time an arms dump was found in the vicinity or the number of times they turned a blind eye in areas once considered "hotbeds" of IRA activity. But if there was clear public discomfort at being suddenly confronted by the inevitable backlash of the fight for freedom - manifest in attempts to scapegoat the media this week for alleged intrusiveness - it seems that for some of those closest to the victims, the suffering and recrimination have hardly begun.This was painfully obvious this week at some of the purported burial sites. At Lacken, there were no flowers, no loved ones waiting, only the derelict house where two elderly brothers once lived, in a wilderness where the imagination forces images of young Danny McIlhone being walked to his death over the rugged fields, stone walls and broad stream running across the route to his purported grave at the side of a Wicklow hill.Similar thoughts assail one in the remoteness of Bragan, near Emyvale, where a teenager called Columba McVeigh is alleged to lie. Up the road, an old man lowers his voice to a whisper: "They hadn't a right to leave a young boy to that. You wouldn't do it to an animal."