Family in shock as tsunami victim’s body identified

THE brother of a 23-year-old Wexford man missing since a tsunami devastated South Asia said the discovery of his remains yesterday was still a shock, four months after the tragedy.

The remains of student Michael Murphy were positively identified in Thailand. He had been on holiday in Khao Lak when the waves devastated the Thai coastline on December 26 last.

“We got the news in the form of a phone call early this morning,” Paul Murphy said. “We don’t really know how we feel about it yet. I suppose it’s a bit of a relief but it’s also a shock, even though we’ve been living this now for four months and expecting a call, hoping even.

“We don’t really know yet when Michael’s remains will be home so we can’t plan the funeral yet.”

His family in Ballyconnigar, Co Wexford, were told yesterday morning his body had been positively identified at the Disaster Victims Identification Centre in Thailand from dental records.

The Murphy family had only returned home from attending the funeral of Dublin woman Lucy Coyle, another Irish victim of the tsunami, on Thursday. The positive identification of Mr Murphy’s body means the bodies of all four Irish people lost in the tsunami have been recovered.

Michael Murphy was a graduate in Nautical Science at Cork Institute of Technology and had been backpacking in Australia before travelling to Thailand in December.

Following the disaster, his younger brother Paul and close friend and cousin Michael O’Donnell had travelled to Thailand to try to locate him.

Deputy Superintendent John O’Driscoll, who has been working on identifying the Irish people missing in the tsunami, said yesterday the application to have Mr Murphy’s body returned to Ireland would go before the Thai authorities today.

“While at an earlier time there was the possibility of finding somebody (alive), but that is long gone, so the only hope lately has been that we would have an identification of a body,” he said.

“We have a 100% success rate, which is extraordinary in a way. There will be an unknown number of bodies at this stage which will not be recovered. It vindicates the identification process that was put in place.”

Earlier this month the body of Ms Coyle from Killiney was recovered, while in the weeks following the disaster, the bodies of Conor Keightley from Tyrone and Dublin woman Eilis Finnegan were found.

More than 125,000 people died as a result of the tsunami and thousands are still missing.