A Dublin man suffering from dementia who had been missing for four nights was found this morning in Alicante in Spain.
Liam Cooney (64), from Cabra in Dublin, had disappeared nearby his hotel in Benidorm, Saturday morning after socialising the night before with his son and a group of friends on holiday there.
His family had spent yesterday evening handing out flyers to travellers in Dublin airport with a picture of Mr Cooney and had planned to fly out today to assist in the search.
The Department of Foreign Affairs had also appointed a liaison officer to the family and were working with Spanish police to try and locate Mr Cooney.
The search ended this morning when Mr Cooney's son Liam Jnr received a call from the Irish embassy in Madrid that a man who couldn't remember his name had been found in the airport in Alicante.
There, he found his father, who he said was healthy but extremely disoriented.
"He didn't have a clue where he was" he said. "I couldn't tell you [how he got to Alicante] to be honest, he couldn't tell me how he had, he couldn't remember."
Liam Jnr then took his father back to the hotel in Benidorm where he cleaned himself up and is now awaiting the rest of his family, who still plan on travelling to Benidorm to bring him home safely.
Mr Cooney had originally gone missing when Liam Jnr stopped to go the toilet 100m from their hotel in the early hours of Saturday morning.
When he turned around moments later, his father was gone.
"It was my fault he was missing in the first place so it would have been a nightmare facing everybody when they came over today if we hadn't found him," Mr Cooney told The Irish Times.
"I'm over the moon that we got him, it was a nightmare for the last few days."