ELLEN COSS BROWN’S face stares out of the now slightly tattered posters placed by her family in shop windows across south Dublin.

DETECTIVES who headed the investigation into the missing British schoolgirls, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, have been asked to examine the case of disappeared Kilkenny woman, Jo Jo Dullard.

MISSING. This one word cannot describe the range of emotions it brings when it must be used to describe a family member or friend. And yet it is a word that describes hundreds of Irish people who for one reason or another, disappear from the lives of their loved ones without a trace.