State’s coroners’ offices currently holding 27 unidentified remains

There are 27 unidentified remains held by coroners’ offices throughout the State, an exercise co-ordinated by the Department of Justice has found. In the first-ever work to quantify the number of unidentified remains being held, each coroner in the State was asked to supply the department with details of what was held in their district.

Returns were received from all coroners by the end of February 2022 and shared with An Garda Síochána. The returns provided details of 13 unidentified whole remains and 14 partial remains, some of which are historical.

The information will now be held in a central database that will be accessible by all relevant agencies. Until now, there was no means of centralising information from different coroners throughout the country. The remains of Limerick man Denis Walsh, who went missing in 1996, were not identified until 25 years later, in 2021, having been held in a hospital mortuary in Galway for 18 years. “In my opinion, gardaí did not do their job properly, they did not join up the dots,” his father, also named Denis, said last year.

In a statement, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said she was committed to a permanent centralised database for unidentified remains, with details updated on an annual basis.

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“For the reasons of sensitivity to the impact on families of missing people and to current and or possible future investigations, the locations of these remains will not be disclosed,” she said.

“Going forward, coroners will be required on an annual basis to provide data on unidentified remains in their annual statistical returns to the Minister for Justice. This data will also be shared with An Garda Síochána.

Alan Bailey, a former Garda sergeant who was national co-ordinator of Operation Trace and the Garda’s cold case unit, welcomed the setting up of a central database.

He said in his 13 years with Operation Trace he had seen at first hand the distress experienced by families who had lost a loved one.

He said the Garda operation had begun with an investigation into the disappearance of six women in the Leinster area. By the time it concluded its work, the investigation had been widened to include 13 missing women.

Mr Bailey told RTÉ’s News at One it was important that all the details of unidentified bodies be kept in a central repository available for examination.

With DNA samples on file, he said, it would be easy to match up with any familial DNA samples to help find out who the unidentified people were.

He said until now coroners’ offices did not have ways of contacting other coroners’ offices.

Asked would this new database improve the chances of identifying the 27 remains, he replied: “There is a hugely significant chance now. With the improvement in DNA, it suggests you will almost certainly get a hit on it,” he said.