This weekend marks 50 years since Columba McVeigh was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA. In a deeply moving and personal piece, his sister writes about her family’s desperate quest to find his body
I’ll be with them again tomorrow.
We are the Families of the Disappeared.
This will be particularly hard for me and I’ll need all the warmth and support I know they’ll give me.
Because it will be 50 years almost to the day since my brother Columba McVeigh was murdered and secretly buried by the IRA.
Columba was 19 years old when he went off to Dublin from our home in Donaghmore, Co Tyrone, to start a new job in 1975.
The last photo of Dympna and Columba in the summer of 1975 (Wave Trauma Centre)
Like every Irish mother, Mum wanted to make sure he had all he needed, and as much as she loved him, she knew he wouldn’t do it himself. And so, as his big sister, it was my job to get him clothes and everything else.
I saw him onto the bus.
He would write home to Mum now and again, and in a letter he wrote about seeing Eamon DeValera’s funeral in Dublin.
He signed it ‘From your big son, Columba’. It was his last letter home.
And then nothing.
People go missing all the time, we were told. Perhaps he’d gone to England for another job. Maybe he’s gone to America with a girlfriend to start a new life.
I don’t know if my Mum and Dad got hope from the ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybes’. I doubt it.
I remember once I thought I saw him at Mass and my mum made me go back every week to the same Mass and wait at the back in case I saw him again.
Mum and Dad were devastated by the silence as year followed year.
And then we were told in 1999, 24 long years later, that Columba was never coming home. And that opened another whole new chapter of pain and despair.
Columba was born on September 27, 1955. He was murdered 20 years later.
But that wasn’t the end.
Dympna (11) with Columba (11) at her First Holy Communion
Until we are able to bring him home to give him a Christian burial and to know that he rests beside our Mum and Dad, this torment is not ended.
I was at the search site recently on Bragan Bog, Co Monaghan, where the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) is looking for Columba, and I met with the forensic team and I looked out on to the vastness of Bragan Bog,
I still have hope.
If I didn’t have hope, what would I have?
Hope is what motivates me to still campaign and lobby for Columba and the other Disappeared every chance I get.
But the pain never goes away.
There are tears every day of my life, behind a mask of normality.
Getting out of bed to start a new day, every day, and Columba is the first thought in my head. And then the mask is the second thought in my head: parenting my kids as best I could, smiling at the neighbours, going to work and making a living.
Always with a mask on my face and tears in my eyes and a heaviness in my heart.
My Mum, when she prayed for Columba, put him in with the Prayers for the Living. I put him in with the Prayers for the Dead.
That is exactly how we were — in limbo, stuck in the middle not knowing where he lay.
It’s a horrible place to be.
The not knowing is horrible. It’s just heavy and sore and always there.
It’s part of my life I have had to carry and for years I could not talk about it.
For years I could not go near Bragan Bog.
Seared into my brain is the image of Columba being taken across that desolate place in the cold and the dark.
I can hear him crying out for his Mum.
A letter from Columba McVeigh to his mother Vera
It’s still so hard to go there, but I do. I have to.
For most of my adult life all I could do was think about Columba and pray privately.
Like the others whose loved ones were murdered and disappeared, we lived in silence and fear.
Not any more.
I want to say “my brother Columba McVeigh” as loudly as I can. My purpose is so clear.
I’m going to keep his name alive and fresh and at the forefront of people’s thoughts until he is found.
We want Columba home. We want him buried with my Mum and Dad.
His name is already on the gravestone.
My purpose is to get the information we need to find him.
My purpose is to not let those who know where he is rest easy or forget.
We must find him.
And on Sunday I’ll be with my second family.
I will be with representatives of the ICLVR, whose work to recover the remains of the Disappeared is just amazing.
I’ll be with Sandra Peake from WAVE, without whose support I don’t know where I would be.
She sees opportunities, she opens doors, she works tirelessly for the families and for me. And most of all she cares.
She cares deeply.
It is that kind of care that motivates me to do more.
And I’ll be with Columba.
Anyone with information on any of the four outstanding ICLVR Disappeared cases —Joe Lynskey, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac and Seamus Maguire— should contact the ICLVR. All information is treated in the strictest confidence. The ICLVR can be contacted by telephone: +353 1 602 8655. E-mail information to: Secretary@iclvr.ie. By post to: ICLVR PO Box 10827. Crimestoppers can be contacted on 0800 555 111 and the untraceable anonymous online form is at www.crimestoppers-uk.org. Anyone with information about Lisa Dorrian should call the detectives working on the case on 101 or they can provide information without leaving their name or giving their details through the independent charity Crimestoppers 0800 555 111.