Gardaí investigating the suspected murder of Kyran Durnin (8) have expanded their search of the child’s former home to nearby wasteland.
Since Tuesday, Garda Forensic and Scenes of Crime experts have been systematically searching the former family home on Emer Terrace, Dundalk, Co Louth.
The house was the Durnin home until last May and since then renovation work and a deep clean have been carried out to prepare it for new tenants. The current tenants have no link to the investigation.
Gardaí have been digging up the small back garden and patio area using a small excavator since Tuesday. That work is largely complete, although the search of the house is expected to continue for the rest of the week. On Tuesday, gardaí could be seen dumping soil and other waste in a skip left outside the house
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On Wednesday, a larger digger was brought to the site and work began excavating an area of wasteland directly beside the house. Digs may also take place at other locations depending on the results of the search, sources said.
Gardaí are searching for Kyran’s remains or any evidence relating to the child.
The case of the boy, who is missing and presumed dead, is “very extreme, very complex and very challenging”, according to Kate Duggan, the chief executive of Tusla, the State child and family agency.
Tulsa on Wednesday confirmed it had alerted the Garda “to a significant concern” last August about the child, when he and his mother were reported missing.
The investigation into what happened to Kyran has been upgraded to a murder investigation and his mother has been located in the UK. A search at the former Durnin family home on Emer Terrace, Dundalk, Co Louth, began on Monday and is expected to continue for several days.
“We have also commenced an internal review, to look at our engagements and interactions with Kyran and his family,” it said. Though Tusla had dealings with the family, Kyran was not in State care and sources said it was not suspected he was being abused.
Speaking at a Health Management Institute of Ireland (HMI) conference on Wednesday, Ms Duggan acknowledged the huge media interest in the case. “We’re across the papers, in relation to what’s a very extreme case, a very complex case, a very challenging case, and the immediate go-to of the three Ministers [which Tusla reports to] has been accountability,” Ms Duggan said.
“We’ll find who’s accountable. We’ll find that person, at a point in time when there is frontline social workers today trying to hold that case and trying to hold that family, and trying to hold each other. It puts us ... in a very challenging environment.”
Meanwhile, the case was raised in the Dáil when Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín questioned how a vulnerable child could just go missing for two years.
He asked: “How broken is the State care system that we’re not talking about an intervention here, that we’re actually talking about the potential murder of a child?”
He said the case was “dark and tragic” and the political establishment expressed “shock and disbelief” over what had happened to Kyran. “But the truth is that Kyran is only one of 257 children who are known to have died in State care just in the last 10 years.”
[ Kyran Durnin: Why case of missing child is now a murder investigationOpens in new window ]
Taoiseach Simon Harris told Mr Tóibín this was not about the political establishment. “This is just to do with basic humanity. An eight-year-old boy effectively went missing for two years and the saddest and most painful thing is that nobody asked why or where was he, for that period of time,” Mr Harris said.
“And any one of us thinking that that could happen to any child is deeply upsetting, and ... is absolutely going to require a structure to get to the exact bottom of this, of that there is no doubt.”
Why Gardaí fear a missing eight-year-old boy was murdered
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