‘As far as I know, Kevin was held at a house in Monaghan for three days, and the people that held him got so fond of him they didn’t want him shot,” says Phil McKee, remembering her older brother.
Kevin McKee disappeared from west Belfast in 1972, when he was 17. His aunts went to Sinn Féin, but it said it knew nothing about his whereabouts. In 1999 the IRA issued a list of the people it had “disappeared”, and Kevin was on it.
The last photograph taken of him was by his aunt; it’s a picture, taken on Whiterock Road, of a good-looking young man with a thick mop of brown hair.
Phil McKee, who was nine when Kevin disappeared and is now 50, recalls a lovely older brother who always looked out for her. The story she heard from Aunt Phil was that his good nature also impressed his IRA abductors.
“The ones who were to do it couldn’t do it, so it was Belfast ones that came down and did it, because he was a very friendly person,” says Phil. “They grew that fond of him they did not want him killed. Remembering him, I can understand that: it would have took anybody to have a heart of stone to do what they did to him.”
Phil says many of her memories of Kevin are hazy, because she was a “wee girl” in 1972, but she recalls well how he used to sit in the front room of the family house, then in Moyard in west Belfast, playing records on “a big old-fashioned radiogram” with his arm around his young fiancee, Eileen.
“I think they were only 16 when they got engaged,” says Phil. She met Eileen, who is married and has children, in recent years. “She was crying when she was talking about him,” says Phil. “She said, ‘Jesus, Philomena, I was so in love with Kevin.’ She said he was so good, and so lovable, with his big blue eyes. She said she told her husband all about Kevin, and told all her family as well.”
When he was about 16 Kevin was arrested with some of his friends and taken to Springfield Road barracks. His ever-helpful aunts went to check on him but were told he had escaped and that shots had been fired at him.
Nothing was heard from Kevin for about a year, until he started making contact by letter and telephone. Eventually, at his mother’s urging, he came back to Belfast.
But there were rumours that he was passing information to the British army. Some time after that he was abducted and taken to Monaghan.
Phil says he was allowed to make a phone call home to his mother from a priest's house near where he was being held. He asked his mother to bring him some clothes. "My Aunt Philomena drove her down to Monaghan to the house where we think he was held. I'm not even sure if he realised he was being held. The door was answered, and they were told Kevin had just left. The man who answered the door said, 'Take the clothes with you. He'll not be back here.' "
No more contact
There was no more contact. Kevin was killed, as was Seamus Wright. They are belived to have been buried in Coghalstown bog, near Wilkinstown in Co Meath. Phil McKee has no idea whether her brother and Seamus Wright were held, shot or buried together.
Kevin’s disappearance was the start of a slide into mental illness for his mother. “She just sat, night after night, waiting for him to come home,” Phil says. “Before you knew it the days led into months, and the months led into years. And my mother had a lot of nervous breakdowns. When they took Kevin they should have taken her too, because her life had just ended then too.”
Their mother's wish was that she would bury Kevin and that her coffin, when she died, would rest on top of his. Phil says her mother died thinking this had happened. Her mother was at the funeral of Eamonn Molloy, who disappeared in 1975 and whose body was found in 1999. "She was so away at that time, she thought she was attending Kevin's funeral."
The siblings’ upbringing was difficult, exacerbated by the fact that the family felt unable to notify the authorities. “In those days you couldn’t have reported him missing because of the IRA.”
By 1999, when the IRA named Kevin as one of the Disappeared, his mother was “very, very mentally ill”, says Phil. “My mother thought the body would be home the next day. So she started decorating the house. She was deciding what corner she would set the coffin in . . . She says to me, would the coffin be open? I explained to her that, no, it would not be, that it was too long.”
Kevin was killed because the IRA said he was a “tout”: an informer for the RUC, the British army or both. But, his sister asks, who really were the informers?
“I don’t know whether he was or not. You just don’t know. There were people killing people, calling them touts, to cover up their own backs. Kevin is not here to speak for himself. I don’t know what he was, but his body should have been handed back no matter what. And he shouldn’t have been shot in the first place. He was so young. What would Kevin have known at that age?”
Phil has one brother and three sisters, who have preferred to keep away from the campaigning. “Everybody is different, the way they deal with things,” she says. But she won’t give up. “I intend to continue until Kevin’s body is found. My mother is gone now. My children will continue when I’m gone.”
The extended family also wants resolution. They won’t forget Kevin; it’s a name that nephews, nieces and the family keep using. “There must be 20 Kevins in the extended family by now.”
Final word
Phil McKee has a final word for those who were involved in Kevin's abduction, for those who became fond of her brother and for those who killed him and buried him. What she wants desperately is information about the location of his body in Co Meath.
If the people responsible come to her, or to anybody else, with those details she won’t feel bitterness or anger, only gratitude. “I will shake their hands if they will just come forward and give us those little bits of missing information about where exactly Kevin is buried,” Phil says.
“Nobody needs to know who they are. They could never know what that would do for this family. It will be the happiest day of our life, as well as a sad one. It will bring so much happiness to rest our brother on top of our mother. I will shake their hands.”
