Mother prays for safe return of daughter

A DISTRAUGHT mother was praying last night for the safe return of her 11-year-old daughter who has been missing for more than 48 hours.

The disappearance of 11-year-old Catherine O'Driscoll from her home at a Traveller campsite near Crookstown in Co Cork on Friday night has baffled her family and locals in the rural community, just miles from Béal na Bláth where Michael Collins was shot at in 1922.

The alarm was raised in the early hours of Saturday morning but searches helped by the garda helicopter and sniffer dogs have failed to shed light on her whereabouts.

Catherine's mother Kathleen helped in the search of fields within a few miles radius of the site where the family has been living for the past three years. But yesterday evening she was staying near home in the hope that her daughter would come back safely.

"I can't sleep or eat since Friday night, I've been praying since it all started. I lit candles and put up her pictures and I was praying with the Mass on television this morning," she said.

"I'm hoping she'll turn up but I'm having all the bad thoughts, that she might have fallen into a well or a sewage pit. I've already buried two children, one died in an accident and another was a cot death, both within a couple of months of one another," the anxious mother-of-seven said.

She said Catherine was pale after returning from a school trip on Friday evening and she thinks something might have been troubling her. She does not go to school locally but has friends in Bantry and Dunmanway, which could support a reported sighting of her thumbing a lift around three miles west of home at 2.30pm on Saturday. She had called to a nearby farmhouse around six hours earlier and was seen running across the fields afterwards.

But subsequent intensive searches of the surrounding countryside, partly wooded and hilly, were unsuccessful in providing any clues.

Inspector Maurice Walsh said gardaí are confident the report of Catherine being seen on Saturday afternoon was reliable.

"She appeared to be hitching on the road going west from her home, and she might have been picked up and taken in the Bantry or Dunmanway direction," he said.

He appealed to anyone who saw a young girl matching Catherine's description on the road between Crookstown and Coppeen yesterday afternoon to contact Macroom gardaí at 026 20590, the Garda confidential line 1800 666 111, or any station. She is 4'11" tall, thin build with blue eyes and shoulder length blonde hair, and was last seen wearing navy trousers and a brown hooded top.