Time Sinn Féin helped to heal pain

Another family is living in hope today that the gardaí will uncover the remains of a young victim of the IRA’s murderous campaign of attrition they waged almost three decades ago.

A Monaghan bog may release Mrs Vera McVeigh from nearly 30 years’ heartbreak after her 17-year-old son Columba was abducted and coldly murdered by the IRA because they decided he was spying for the British Army.

Twice already in the last five years her hope of finally giving her son a decent burial were cruelly dashed when previous excavations at the same spot proved futile. Yesterday, the gardaí began their third dig at the bog, following information from the IRA that had been conveyed through an intermediary to the Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.

There were nine such victims of the organisation, who are euphemistically referred to as “the disappeared.”

They did not just simply disappear, like missing persons. All of them were brutally executed by the IRA which acted as judge and jury to dispense their brand of perverse justice between 1972 and 1981, and the bodies consigned to nameless graves.

In the interim, the organisation lied and denied their responsibility for the murders and thwarted efforts to locate the graves.

Only in 1999 when the Commission was set up under joint Irish and British legislation, which provided limited immunity for members of the IRA involved in the abduction and killing of the victims, was a list of the victims given to the Commission by the IRA, along with precise details of bodies' locations.

At the time, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams welcomed the start of the process of returning their bodies with the claim that his party had long regarded the issue as one of “human rights and justice.”

It was an issue which they had long ignored and acknowledged only when it was politically expedient to do so.

It is also an issue which Sinn Féin must use their influence to bring to a final and humane resolution.