Locating the remains of victims kidnapped, killed and buried in secret by the IRA is one aspect of the peace process that is working, mourners at a requiem mass for one of the “disappeared” have been told.
Forty-three years after he vanished in west Belfast the family of Kevin McKee buried their loved one in Belfast on Monday afternoon.
The 17-year-old was killed in 1972 along with Seamus Wright, 25, by the Provisional IRA in Belfast. The pair were accused of working for a secret undercover British army unit at the time.
DNA tests last week confirmed that the remains of two bodies found in a County Meath bog in the Irish Republic were those of McKee and Wright.
They were among more than a dozen people that republicans killed and then “disappeared” during the Troubles.
Father Michael Murtagh told mourners at St Peter’s Cathedral in west Belfast that it was “important for Kevin and for his family that they are given the chance to grieve publicly and acknowledge the awful tragedy his murder and secret burial was”.
The priest also praised the work of the organisation set up to find the disappeared – the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR).
“It is part of our sometimes faltering peace process that is working,” Murtagh said.
He called on everyone to remember the impact that the policy of disappearing victims had on their families.
“We remind ourselves how this affected each of his family members, those living and those dead, especially his late mother Mary.
“We acknowledge 43 years of pain, of wondering, of uncertainty and not knowing what had happened. We acknowledge that at times there were very few to turn to and it was a lonely road for them to travel.”
McKee was later buried beside his mother in Blaris cemetery in Lisburn, Co Antrim.
The funeral for Wright will take place in west Belfast on Tuesday.
Digging meanwhile is continuing at the site where their remains were found. The ICLVR believes the remains of another victim, the former monk-turned-IRA activist Joe Lynskey, are also in Coghalstown bog.
The most notorious case of the disappeared was that of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of 10 who was kidnapped, taken in a car from west Belfast across the border to the republic, shot dead and buried at a beach in Co Louth.
The former Belfast IRA commander and hunger striker Brendan Hughes claimed the Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, had given the order for McConville to be killed and buried in secret to avoid political embarrassment for the republican movement. Adams has always denied any connection to the McConville murder or even being in the IRA.
Four people remain on the disappeared list, three of them believed to have been kidnapped and killed by the IRA. The missing presumed dead include SAS Captain Robert Nairac, who vanished while on a covert mission in South Armagh.
The other person on the list is Séamus Ruddy, a County Down schoolteacher and member of the Irish Republican Socialist party. He was abducted, tortured and killed by a faction of the Irish National Liberation Army in Paris in the 1980s. Despite searches in the French capital and in a forest in Normandy, Ruddy’s remains have never been found.
