‘It’s eerie, it’s awful, the place will never be the same again’

Catherine Shanahan on Inch Strand

But there was nothing normal about yesterday, nor was there any pleasure to be gleaned from the solitude of Inch Strand.

A popular East Cork summer spot for surfers and swimmers, its only occupants yesterday were a couple of gardaí cordoning it off to preserve a crime scene. On each side of the beach barriers went up, one blocking off the strand from Poor Head the

adjacent headland the other closing off the clifftop walk to those approaching from Guileen. An exception was made for a local man he was allowed to cross the beach with his dog to return to his clifftop home.

A couple of hundred yards down the road, near Inch cross, volunteers searching for the body of a young boy had made a grim discovery. In dense roadside undergrowth they had stumbled across what is believed to be the body of 11-year-old Robert Holohan, missing from his home in Ballyedmond, Midleton, since January 4.

Those living nearby, in Ballintra East, were shocked and saddened in equal measure. One woman, who moved to the area in the summer of 2003, was aghast at the horror in her own backyard.

Her house atop a cliff with an eye to the strand was now overlooking unspeakable tragedy.

"Myself and my husband used to sit on the beach and look up at this house, it was our dream home. I cannot believe what has happened. It's eerie, it's awful, the place will never be the same again," she said.

She has a young daughter much the same age as Robert. "It's horrible for her to come home to this, that something like this could happen."

Neighbours wonder why, if the body was dumped, it was left close to the road. "Whoever was involved mustn't have been local, there was a derelict house nearby, Anyone local would have known about that."

One man searched a derelict dwelling to the rear of his home yesterday. "If I'd gone up the road 20 or 30 feet I think I would have found the body not that I would have wanted to find it," he said.

Much of the land here is given over to dense undergrowth, a convenient dumping ground for a body. Wild and exposed, its charm in the warmer months is replaced by a certain desolation this time of year.

After yesterday's discovery, the gloom that descended on Inch Strand will take a long time to lift.