Very few children in Ireland have disappeared in suspected abductions in the past 40 years. But two of those who did, Mary Boyle and Philip Cairns have never been found. Alison Healy reports
Philip Cairns was aged 13 when he went missing on his way back to school after lunch in October 1986. The boy, from Rathfarnham in Dublin, would have celebrated his 32nd birthday this month. Yesterday his father, also Philip, said he found it too painful to talk about the matter.
A massive search operation was organised after Philip went missing. Hundreds of gardaí, local people and sub-aqua divers searched the Dublin mountains, forests and lakes and rivers. More than 400 sightings were reported but they yielded nothing.
Philip's classmates at Coláiste Eanna CBS voluntarily came back to the school during their mid-term break to be interviewed by gardaí. Days after his disappearance, Philip's school bag turned up in a local laneway that had already been searched. Forensic tests on the bag did not reveal any new information.
Speaking to The Irish Times at the launch of the Garda's missing children website (www.missingkids.ie) last year, Philip's mother, Alice Cairns, said his disappearance was very difficult to cope with. "In the beginning, you think it's been 20 minutes, or an hour," she said.
"Then, as the day goes on, you get more worried but you don't give up hope he'll come back. But Philip didn't return, and you have to keep going."
The case of Robert Holohan has brought memories flooding back to the family of Mary Boyle, the six-year-old girl who vanished in Co Donegal in 1977. Mary, from Kincasslagh, was with her family on a visit to her grandparents, near Ballyshannon, when she disappeared. She was last seen following her uncle, Gerry Gallagher, as he returned a ladder to a neighbour. Mary turned back for her grandparents' house but never arrived. Her father, Charlie Boyle, says all he and his wife Ann can do is pray for Robert's family.
"They are going to have a hard time ahead. I hope they get on as best as they can," he says. "It brings it all back, it really does."
Yet the Holohan family have had the comfort of finding their son's body.
"It would be better to find something, otherwise you never know what happened," Charlie Boyle explains. Asked if the family has a gut instinct about what happened to Mary, he says: "No, you can't really, because you don't have a body."
The family has accepted that Mary is probably dead "because if she was alive, you would have heard something by now".
When An Garda Síochána launched the www.missingkids.ie website last September, an artist's impression of how Mary might look today, aged 34, was included.
"We got a lot of feedback but nothing came out of it," Charlie Boyle says.
Some similarities have been noted between the death of Sligo girl Bernadette Connolly and that of Robert Holohan. Bernadette was 10 years old when she was abducted from near her home in Collooney on April 17th, 1970. Like Robert, she was on her bicycle when the incident happened. Bernadette was going to a neighbour's house on an errand but never arrived. Her upturned bicycle was found two miles from her home.
An exhaustive search yielded nothing. Almost four months later, Bernadette's body was found in a bog on the side of the Curlew Mountains. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
More than 2,300 males were fingerprinted, but despite a massive investigation, the killer was never found.
In an episode of the Cracking Crime programme broadcast on RTÉ last August, Bernadette's sister, Ann Guilfoyle, said the family did not like talking about the murder and had been in denial for a long time.
"We want closure and we want answers because my father and mother went to their grave without knowing who murdered their daughter," she said.