Missing (26 page)
Authors: Barry Cummins
Throughout the late 1970s, 80s and 90s and into the new century the Gardaí examined every line of inquiry open to them. During their initial investigations in the late
1970s they interviewed hundreds of people. Though no-one was ever formally arrested for questioning, the Gardaí did question a number of people closely about their movements on the day Mary
Boyle disappeared. One detective ruefully remembered how he and a colleague thought they were about to crack the case.
We had this man we were questioning—you know, in general, about whether he had seen or heard anything that afternoon. He’d been in the Ballyshannon-Cashelard
area at the time of Mary’s disappearance, and he was one of many men who we wanted to rule in or rule out as suspects. He was a married man and had children. I remember we were chatting
with him, and all of a sudden he started to cry. He put his head in his hands, and there he was, sobbing. My experience before that was that lads cry because their conscience is at them. I
thought we were about to get somewhere. But then he raised his head and wiped his eyes and said he knew nothing. And he repeated it. ‘I know nothing.’ Who knows why he cried? Who
knows?
In the years since Mary Boyle disappeared a number of extensive searches have been undertaken in the south Donegal area. Some of these searches have been as a result of
anonymous information provided to local gardaí. In November 1995 members of the Garda Sub-Aqua Unit spent a week searching a lake near Cashelard, but nothing was found. In September 1996 a
patch of bogland in Cashelard was searched after a request from the Boyle family. A mechanical digger was brought in and a quarter of an acre of swampy bogland, about half a mile from the old
Gallagher home, was drained. In an intensive two-day search, nothing was found.
The Gardaí also suspect that the body of a fifteen-year-old Co. Tyrone girl lies in the area between Ballyshannon and the Co. Tyrone border. Arlene Arkinson from Castlederg, Co. Tyrone,
disappeared in August 1994 after attending a disco in Bundoran. During searches in the late 1990s around the Pettigo area of Co. Donegal for Arlene Arkinson’s body the Gardaí were also
privately hopeful that some trace of Mary Boyle might turn up. Nothing was found; but the Gardaí know that any effort to excavate any land around south Co. Donegal may inadvertently turn up
a lead in either case.
In 2002 Sergeant John Kennedy retired. He was one of the original team to investigate Mary Boyle’s disappearance, and the last of that team to retire. At the time of his
retirement he and Superintendent John McFadden travelled to meet Ann and Charlie Boyle in Burtonport to assure them that although the original Garda team were all now retired, the investigation
into Mary’s disappearance was still at the top of the agenda of the Gardaí in Co. Donegal. File no. C31/32A/77 will remain open until Mary Boyle is found.
A memorial to Mary Boyle was unveiled in Cionn Caslach, Co. Donegal, in June 2000. Ann Boyle told me that the time was right for the memorial.
We knew about the memorial to missing people that was being planned for Kilkenny. It’s a great idea, but it’s just a bit too far for us to get to. So I started
to wonder about setting up some memorial closer to home. Now we’ve a lovely little grotto at Cionn Caslach. I didn’t want anything too big. This is just right.
The memorial features a small statue of a guardian angel, a plaque bearing a photograph of Mary Boyle, and the inscription
Faoi choimirce an aingil choimeádaí
go raibh tú. Mary Boyle, who disappeared from her family on 18 March 1977—aged 7 years.
Ann and Charlie Boyle say they can’t be sure whether someone knows what happened to their daughter. How can they be sure of anything? Ann told me that it’s the not knowing
that’s the worst thing.
Newspapers report on Mary’s disappearance and they mention certain things and draw conclusions. But nobody knows the real answers. Until Mary is found, who knows
anything?
Philip Cairns
I
n October 1986, in a Dublin suburb, something terrible and as yet unexplained happened to a thirteen-year-old boy walking to school. It was just
after lunchtime, and Philip Cairns was making his way back to Coláiste Éanna in Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, where he had recently started first year. He never made it to school.
Somewhere on the fifteen-minute walk from his home in Ballyroan Road, Philip Cairns was abducted.
Despite a massive investigation, Philip Cairns has never been found. And there is another dimension to this distressing case—an extraordinary event that continues to both baffle and
intrigue everyone involved in the search for Philip Cairns. A week after Philip was snatched from the roadside, the schoolbag he was carrying when he disappeared was left in a laneway a short
distance from his home. Was it dumped there by Philip’s abductor hurriedly trying to get rid of evidence? Or was it left there by a young person who had found it on the day Philip
disappeared, perhaps someone who was too afraid to come forward? Or was it left there by someone related to the abductor, who continues to keep their dark secret?
The violent abduction of Philip Cairns continues to shock a country in which child abductions are extremely rare. Philip Cairns’s disappearance happened nine years after the disappearance
of seven-year-old Mary Boyle in Co. Donegal; these remain the only unsolved missing children cases in Ireland that are non-parental abductions.
The disappearance of Philip Cairns from a busy road in a populous Dublin suburb still deeply disturbs the gardaí who originally worked on the case, and those who continue to work on it;
but their pain is nothing compared with the constant anguish endured by Philip’s parents, Alice and Philip Cairns, his four older sisters, Mary, Sandra, Helen, and Suzanne, and his younger
brother, Eoin.
Philip Cairns sat at the table in his home in Ballyroan Road and began doing homework. It was after one o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday 23 October 1986. He was doing
his maths homework, and he had a few minutes to spare before heading back to school. The lunch break at Coláiste Éanna was from 12:45 to 1:45 p.m., and the walk to school would take
him about fifteen minutes. Also in the house were Philip’s sister Suzanne and his granny, May, who was living with the Cairns family. Philip’s mother, Alice, was also at home but was
getting ready for a trip to town: another of Philip’s sisters, Helen, had a toothache that needed to be treated.
Philip gathered the books he’d need for his afternoon classes and got ready to head back to school. He had religion, geography and maths in the afternoon; having started in secondary
school two months before, he was beginning to learn off by heart what classes he had each day. He went to talk to his granny and then went back to another room to get his schoolbag. From the
hallway he called out, ‘Cheerio, Gran. I’m off,’ and he pulled the front door shut behind him. Within minutes, he would be abducted from the roadside.
Nobody saw Philip Cairns leave his house to go back to school that afternoon. It was an ordinary day in the Cairns house, and Philip was following his normal routine of coming home for lunch. To
this day his mother cannot even remember whether she left for town before or after Philip left for school. The fact that little can be recalled about that lunchtime is precisely because it was so
ordinary. But some time around 1:30 p.m. that afternoon, somewhere along the curving Ballyroan Road in Rathfarnham, or on a side road close to the school, Philip Cairns was abducted.
All through that Thursday afternoon no-one was aware of the ordeal that Philip Cairns was going through. To this day only Philip and his abductor can know what happened in the hours after he was
snatched from the roadside, where he was taken, and what happened to him after that. All that afternoon Philip’s family thought he was in school, while at Coláiste Éanna his
teachers assumed he was at home because of illness, or a family emergency.
When Philip didn’t come home from school that evening, his family began to worry. He was a dependable boy and followed a particular routine. His father was not very worried at first,
thinking Philip might be out with new friends from school. Starting in secondary school is a daunting time for any teenager, but Philip was beginning to find his feet. It was only when his mother
arrived home from town that the first feelings came that something wasn’t right. She was met by her eldest daughter, Mary, who said to her: ‘Philip isn’t in. He didn’t come
home from school.’ Alice was concerned, and she went around to the house of Enda Cloke, Philip’s best friend in school, hoping Philip would be there, but he wasn’t. She then
checked at the school, where a teacher told her that Philip had never returned that afternoon. It was then that everyone realised that something serious had happened.
At 6:30 p.m. a garda at the desk at Rathfarnham Garda Station received a phone call from Paddy Cloke, Enda’s father, who was also a garda. That conversation was to set in train an
investigation that continues to this day.
The pain suffered by Alice and Philip Cairns and their five remaining children has not diminished, despite the length of time since Philip was cruelly taken from them. For
Alice and Philip, who still live in Ballyroan Road, there are feelings of hope, anger, frustration, and sadness. The fact that a boy could be abducted on a busy Co. Dublin road, and never be found,
is a matter of terrible concern for all parents; for the parents of the missing boy, it is an agonising and unrelenting mystery.
Alice and Philip Cairns know their son was abducted by an unknown attacker. But after that there is just speculation. Tears well up in the eyes of both parents when they think of the boy they
have lost. With clarity, Alice recounted her memories of the night on which all their lives changed for ever.
Once I arrived home and heard Philip hadn’t come home, I went around to his friend Enda Cloke, but Philip wasn’t there. I contacted the school, and found out he
hadn’t been there in the afternoon. Another friend that Philip had was Gareth, who also lived a short distance away; but Philip wasn’t there either. We called in the Gardaí
immediately. I remember it was getting dark quite early by the end of October, and the weather was quite bad that night. An inspector called down from Rathfarnham Garda Station and said that
because of Philip’s age, and the weather, they were putting out a full alert, contacting all gardaí immediately. And then the full-scale search began.
The disappearance of Philip Cairns is a mystery that continues to haunt both the Cairns family and the Gardaí, who have often feared that the same violent person might
strike again. At whatever point Philip Cairns was snatched on the walk back to Coláiste Éanna, the road would have been quite busy. It was a fluke that the abduction most probably
happened just seconds before and seconds after other cars and pedestrians travelled past the same spot. Perhaps the abduction happened just moments before or after someone went in or out their
front door, someone who, but for a few seconds, could have been a crucial witness. Perhaps there actually is a witness, someone who did see a neighbour or a motorist acting suspiciously, a person
who has kept what they saw secret all these years. Certainly, if you walk from Philip’s house, turning to the right towards Coláiste Éanna, the first thing to strike you is the
volume of traffic. Rarely a minute goes by without a car travelling along the road that links the residential areas of Templeogue and Ballyboden. The large semi-detached houses on each side of the
wide road would also have provided a vantage-point for a potential witness to Philip’s abduction. But no-one has come forward to say they saw Philip being dragged into a car, or speaking to
anyone on the roadside.
The Cairns family have lived in Ballyroan Road since the late 1970s. Photographs of Philip making his First Holy Communion and his Confirmation have a prominent place in the
sitting-room. Alice showed me a St Brigid’s Cross that Philip made in school a short time before he disappeared; it now has pride of place in the hallway of the house. Alice told me Philip
was a quiet and conscientious pupil.
He enjoyed his time in primary school and was very good at arts and crafts. When it came to essays and written tests, Philip would shine. He played a bit of sports,
including hurling, and I remember he joked that he didn’t know if he’d play for Dublin or Kilkenny—because I’m from Kilkenny, you see. Philip had settled into secondary
school and had good friends. He also had interests outside of school and would play out in the garden with his friends and his brother. Everything was normal when this happened.
Philip Cairns was born on 1 September 1973. For the first five years of his life the family lived at St Columba’s Road, Drumcondra, Dublin, after which they moved to
Rathfarnham, to the south of the city. When Philip disappeared in October 1986 his four sisters—Mary, Sandra, Helen, and Suzanne—were aged from twenty to fifteen. His only brother,
Eoin, was a year and two months younger than Philip, and the two boys were very close.
