Paisley to meet mother of IRA abduction victim

Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley is to meet the mother of Columba McVeigh, one of a number of people abducted by the IRA whose body has not been found.

Party sources confirmed tonight plans for a meeting which followed Mr Paisley’s claim that he had been asked by recently deceased Monsignor Denis Faul to take up the disappeared’s plight.

Mr Paisley recently claimed he had received the death bed plea from Monsignor Faul.

The North Antrim MP said Vera McVeigh had a right to know where her son was buried.

“I know how people feel,” the DUP leader said.

“Here is a body. It is not buried. Somebody knows where it is.

“Why can’t they decently hand the body back?

“Let the dear woman have it buried according to her beliefs and give her peace.

“Anybody that’s against that should leave this country.”

Columba McVeigh was 17 when he was kidnapped by the IRA in 1975 who accused him of being a spy.

In 1999, the organisation finally admitted the Donaghmore man’s murder.

A two-week search for his body took place along a mountainside bog on the southern side of the Irish border near Emyvale, Co Monaghan, after the IRA passed on fresh information about where his body was believed to be buried.

However the gardaí were unable to recover the body.

At the funeral of Monsignor Denis Faul, who died aged 74 after a long battle with cancer, mourners including Sinn Féin chief negotiator Martin McGuinness, were told in Carrickmore, Co Tyrone, that the outspoken priest wanted the bodies of the North’s disappeared returned.

Bishop Gerrard Clifford, the auxiliary bishop of Armagh, said: “His plea even on his deathbed was addressed to those who had any knowledge or hint of where these bodies had been placed.

“His words were clear: ’Anyone who has knowledge of the unburied bodies bears the responsibility for that.’”

Among those whose bodies the Commission for the Recovery of Victims’ Remains has failed to find are:

Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright, both 25, who disappeared from the Andersontown area of west Belfast in October 1972, and who the IRA claimed were buried at Coghallstown, near Navan in Co Meath.

Danny McIlhone from west Belfast who went missing in July 1981 and whose body is believed to be concealed at Ballynultagh in Co Wicklow.

Twenty-four-year-old Brendan Megraw from Twinbrook, on the outskirts of west Belfast, who was abducted in April 1978 and is believed to be buried at Oristown near Kells in Co Meath.

Northern Ireland’s Human Rights Commissioner, Monica McWilliams and nationalist SDLP leader Mark Durkan have also appealed for more information about the locations of the remaining disappeared and for information about missing 57-year-old Co Armagh man Charlie Armstrong.