Joe Lynskey’s final moments before his murder more than 50 years ago still haunt his niece.
The body of the former Cistercian monk has never been found and last Friday a phone call was made to Maria Lynskey by a lead investigator searching for him.
It was a call she dreaded.
Remains exhumed from a grave in a rural Co Monaghan cemetery in November were believed to be Joe, the first person “disappeared” by the IRA in 1972.
Information had been received by investigators about suspicious activity during the 1970s at a grave in a cemetery by a church in the village of Annyalla around the time of his disappearance.
[ Joe Lynskey remains are not those exhumed in Monaghan, tests showOpens in new window ]
Desperate to bring “Uncle Joe” home, Maria had all the funeral arrangements in place; she “really believed it was him”.
Alone in her west Belfast house, the 77-year-old was told over the phone that DNA testing had concluded it “was not Joe”.
“My first reaction was large disappointment ... I’m still trying to get through it,” she says.
In the four months since the exhumation, she discovered that his only request from his abductors was a set of Rosary beads.
“It’s the image of him saying the Rosary before he was executed. I can’t get that out of my head,” she says.
Visits to Mount Melleray Abbey in Co Waterford, where Joe Lynskey trained to become a monk from the age of 17, are her earliest memories of her uncle.
Family trips to the monastery only took place twice a year due to the length of journey by road from Belfast.
On the eve of his ordination, a telephone call was made to a shop off the Falls Road in Belfast.
It was the early 1950s and the caller, an abbot, asked if he could speak with Joe’s mother.
Charlotte Lynskey was informed that her son wanted to leave his vocation after five years.
At the outbreak of the Troubles, Joe joined the IRA as an intelligence officer in west Belfast.
We all knew he was in the IRA. I’d say when he came out of the monastery he came out for the cause and believed the cause. And the cause executed him
— Maria Lynskey
The night they learned of his departure from the Co Waterford abbey was difficult, says Maria.
“I was a child and we were preparing to go down for the ordination; I remember being in the house the night before,” she says. “There were no phones in people’s homes in those days.”
“The call came through and the abbot said that he didn’t want to go on with it ... My granny was a very religious woman and I think she would have liked her children to be in the clergy. It was a big upset.”
In 2009 the family received another phone call that would lead them to discover that Joe Lynskey was abducted, shot dead and secretly buried by the IRA in August 1972.
He was 40 at the time.
It emerged he was the first of the Disappeared, a group of 17 people murdered and buried in secret locations during the Troubles.
His name was added to an official list used by a body, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR), established by the Irish and British governments during the peace process to recover the victims’ remains.
It took until 2010 for the IRA to admit that he was court-martialled and killed “for breaches of IRA standing orders”.
Unlike some of the other Disappeared, who were accused of being informers, the IRA claimed Lynskey was having an affair with the wife of another IRA man, who he ordered to have shot without it being sanctioned by the group.
Until that point, the Lynskeys assumed he had fled to the United States.
There was “a silence, a complete silence” among republicans in west Belfast as to why he had vanished, says Maria.
“We all knew he was in the IRA. I’d say when he came out of the monastery he came out for the cause and believed the cause.
“And the cause executed him at the end of the day.”
[ ‘Doubly cruel’ for Joe Lynskey family to learn exhumed remains are not hisOpens in new window ]
Joe, the second youngest of six children, moved back into the family home on Harrogate Street in the Lower Falls in Belfast after leaving the monastery and got a job at the former Silk & Rayon factory, facing Clonard Monastery.
His brother, Jackie – Maria’s father – had served in the British navy, and Joe’s IRA membership was “never spoken about”.
“I think there was a clash between them at one stage because my daddy was in the navy – I had my 21st birthday party on HMS Caroline – and Joe was in the IRA.
“But he would have called to my mummy’s house during the 1960s before the Troubles. When he was in the IRA, I knew the house that he was billeted in [the safe house]. Even though it was quite close to where I lived, I never saw him.
“The woman who owned the house had a big family and treated Joe more like a son.”
Maria was pregnant with her first child when her uncle went missing.
She searched for answers as to his whereabouts, a quest that would continue for decades.
“I knew very many republicans and asked them through the years what happened,” she says. “All I ever got was, ‘Don’t know him, never heard of him’.
“I would say it’s a secret that wouldn’t have been told. I don’t ever think it would have come out only for the Boston tapes,” she adds, referring to the controversial oral history project on the Troubles based at Boston College in the US.
The way he disappeared made him an “enigma” to his family, who talked about him “every so often”.
Lies were spread about sightings of their uncle in the US, according to Maria.
In the late 1970s, her brother travelled to New York following the death of another relative and was told by members of Noraid, the US-based funding committee for republicans, that “Joe had just gave a great speech”.
“We’d a friend over there who was high up in Noraid and one of them said to my brother: ‘You just missed Joe’,” she recalls.
“Some other people said that he bought furniture when he moved to Los Angeles. We’ve many, many stories of him. We wanted to believe all that – but at the same time there was always the doubt. But you kept your mouth shut because you didn’t want to be involved and, in a way, you still keep it back.”
In an interview with the Irish News in 2010, former IRA member Dolours Price claimed she drove Joe Lynskey across the Border to face interrogation – and that she begged to drive him to a port so that he could escape to England.
Price said Lynskey knew his fate and told her she would be punished if she let him go.
Maria says her “biggest mistake in life” was “not getting on the Dublin train and going to Malahide” to speak to Price after she went public.
She still has doubts as to the reason he was murdered: “I’ve been told that Joe owned up to what he did; he didn’t deny it. But really and truly it’s a secret and you’re never going to know what happened.”
Her anger at the trauma experienced by the families of the Disappeared is still raw.
“For almost 40 years we were totally in the dark and didn’t know where he was. I go to bed at night and think: ‘Why would you disappear someone?‘”
Maria had wanted to bury her uncle from her late father’s home.
She becomes emotional as she speaks about the planning that had gone in to his funeral in recent months.
It is the second time in a decade that the hopes of the Lynskey family have been raised and then dashed.
In 2015, a search on remote land at Coghalstown in Co Meath led to the unexpected discovery of the remains of Kevin McKee (17) and Seamus Wright (25).
The remains of three others “disappeared” during the Troubles – Co Tyrone teenager Columba McVeigh, SAS-trained officer Robert Nairac or Seamus Maguire, a 26-year-old from Co Armagh – have yet to be found.
“I had everything done to bring him home,” says Maria of her plans for her uncle’s funeral.
“My parish priest has been very good to me. I’d seen the undertakers, I’d all the arrangements made with them and I’d even spoken to my son-in-law, who has a restaurant, about catering.
“I really did think this was the time ... Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
“[Republicans] have all said those who killed Joe are dead. Everybody’s not dead, I’m not dead. There’s senior republicans who know where he is.
“But we just have to get on, dust ourselves down, get back to appealing to people for information. But really, I’ve got to feeling that I don’t think I’ll ever get him back.”
- Anyone with information on the four outstanding Disappeared cases should contact the ICLVR on +353 1 602 8655 or secretary@iclvr.ie or ICLVR PO Box 10827 Dublin, Ireland. All information is treated in the strictest confidence.
