Deaglán de Bréadún looks at the background to the Jean McConville case, which has pained her family for more than 30 years
Insofar as anything ever comes to finality in Northern Ireland, the tragic and heartrending saga of Jean McConville appears to be over.
Nothing can bring the widowed mother of 10 children back to life but at least her reputation has been vindicated by yesterday's statement from the North's Police Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan.
A statement from the Ombudsman carries a lot of weight, both inside and outside Northern Ireland. Mrs O'Loan reports that, after very extensive research, her investigators found "no evidence" to indicate that Mrs McConville ever passed information to the police, the British army or the "security service". Spelling it out so there can be no ambiguity, the Ombudsman states: "She was not an informant."
The term in popular parlance is "informer" which has negative and shameful overtones, even outside republican circles and among the most law-abiding sectors of nationalist Ireland. The stereotype was permanently engraved in the popular mind by John Ford's classic film The Informer, based on Liam O'Flaherty's novel about Gypo Nolan, an IRA man who turned Judas, as it were, and became, in Belfast-speak, a "tout".
The story of Jean McConville revives memories of an especially bitter period at the start of the Troubles. She was a 37-year-old Protestant from loyalist east Belfast who married a Catholic from republican west Belfast.
Mrs McConville converted to Catholicism after their wedding. Arthur McConville was a former British soldier who later went into the building trade. The couple had 10 children.
Arthur died of cancer in 1971 but Jean and the family continued living in Divis Flats, which was constantly in the news because of its use as a launching-pad for IRA bomb and sniper attacks on the British Army.
A common version of events up to now had it that Mrs McConville agreed to pass information to the British army on the local IRA's activities and forthcoming operations. She ignored repeated warnings from the Provisionals, who finally decided to execute her around Christmas time in 1972 after she was abducted from her home.
Normally informers' bodies were strategically placed at some lonely Border road as a macabre warning to others, but Mrs McConville's status as a widowed mother of 10 meant her killing could have generated the wrong kind of publicity for the IRA.
She was therefore taken to a beach just over the Border at Carlingford, Co Louth, where she was shot in the back of the head. Her body was buried in the sand and she became another one of the "disappeared" victims of the Troubles.
Twenty-seven years of shifting sands later, in March 1999, an IRA source told the media that her grave had been located. But her remains were not, in fact, discovered until four years later when members of the public accidentally stumbled on the body while walking at Shelling Hill beach, near Carlingford.
Her funeral took place with Requiem Mass in St Mary's Church in Belfast and, in his homily, Bishop of Down and Connor Dr Patrick Walsh said her killers had touched "the depths of depravity". Presbyterian minister Rev Ruth Patterson read out statements by Mrs McConville's children. The cortege paused briefly at Divis Flats on its way to Holy Trinity graveyard in Lisburn, Co Antrim, where she is interred beside her husband.
The IRA claim that Jean McConville was "arrested by Óglaigh na hÉireann in 1972 and admitted being a British Army informer" has now been expressly challenged and rejected by Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan.
Deciding who did or did not pass information to the security forces is not a normal activity for the Ombudsman's office but there were compassionate reasons for Mrs O'Loan's intervention.
As she pointed out, the situation was unique: "Jean McConville left an orphaned family, the youngest of whom were six- year-old boys. The family have suffered extensively over the years, as we all know, and that suffering has only been made worse by allegations that their mother was an informant."
Additional details of the investigation are to follow shortly and we may end up with a clearer picture of events. But whereas the pain of loss can never be assuaged, the clearing of Mrs McConville's reputation should provide some comfort to her long-suffering family.