'Set yourself free' Columba McVeigh sister's plea to IRA

THE family of Columba McVeigh didn’t know he was one of the so-called IRA Disappeared until 1990 when his brother, Oliver, happened to pick up a copy of Martin Dillon’s book ‘The Dirty War’ in a bookshop.

The 19-year-old from Donaghmore in Co Tyrone hadn’t been seen since 1975.

As Oliver casually flicked through the pages of Dillon’s investigative work on informers, agents, and double agents during the Northern Ireland Troubles, he thought he saw his brother’s name.

A quick search in the index confirmed Oliver’s eyes had not deceived him and he began reading for the first time about what happened the older brother they had all been frantic about, especially their mother, Vera.

Oliver read how on Halloween night 1975, Columba left his Dublin flat to buy cigarettes when the IRA abducted him. His captors later executed and secretly buried the teenager’s body in a bog in Monaghan.

“It was different times, we didn’t have a phone in the house,” Columba’s sister, Dympna Kerr, told the Celt.

“The only way we had to communicate was by letter. We hadn’t heard from Columba for a while, but our mother wasn’t overly concerned; she just thought he had a girlfriend or was busy going out and doing what teenagers do. She thought we’d see him at Christmas.”

It was in December of that year the family first learned of Columba’s disappearance. His flatmate called the McVeighs to say she was moving out of their flat so “someone would need to pick up his clothes”.

Those clothes, and the shirts and jumpers his mother bought for Columba- every birthday and Christmas- for many years after he disappeared, hung in a wardrobe in his bedroom at their home.

“My mother always held on to the thought ‘sure, if he’d been killed in an accident or something, someone would’ve told us’,” Dympna said.

The siblings agonised over whether they should tell their mother what Oliver had read and, in the end, decided against it. They had seen their mother crying and talking to a framed picture she had of Columba for years.

“Oliver tried everything to find out the facts but was just met with brick walls everywhere and, in the back of our heads, we had the words we heard mum saying so many times ‘paper refuses no ink’ and I kept saying to Oliver ‘we have no proof’ and we just left it,” Dympna said.

Not long after their father Paddy died in 1997, their mother Vera’s world shattered when she read an article in a Sunday newspaper repeating Martin Dillon’s account of what happened to her son.

“It was then that all the clothes my mother bought for him were donated to charity,” Dympna said. “From 1997, all my mother wanted was Columba’s body home.”

Then, on Palm Sunday 1998 a man, who introduced himself to Oliver by his Provisional IRA rank and brigade, called to their mother’s home. Oliver met him first and so it was to him the man confirmed Columba’s cruel fate.

“The IRA were making a statement to the media about the Disappeared as part of the Good Friday Agreement later that week and wanted to give us the heads up,” Dympna recalls with more than a hint of repugnance. “Up until then our grief was private but now it was out in the open. In their statement, the IRA said they disappeared 14 people.”

On the wrong side

It was Dympna who dropped Columba off at the bus station in Dungannon to return to Dublin where he worked as a painter. “If I’d known it was the last time any of us would see him alive, things would have been different,” the 72-year-old says today.

The following week, she herself left for Merseyside where she married a Tyrone man, raised three children and has lived for the past 50 years.

When asked to describe her younger brother, Dympna says he was “naive. And vulnerable. But God, was he fun-loving.

“He had an innocent view of the world and was just a happy-go-lucky normal teenager. If you played cards with him, he cheated but he would’ve been having craic the whole time he was doing it.”

Intelligence operation

It has been known for some time that Columba was used by British Army Intelligence for an operation, which, ultimately cost him his life.

In previous media interviews Oliver McVeigh confirmed how Columba was arrested in an early-morning raid on the family home during which the army found bullets in a cigarette pack and blamed the find on Columba.

He was subsequently arrested and convicted of possession of ammunition at the Special Criminal Court and sentenced to prison in the republican wing of the infamous Crumlin Road Jail.

It later emerged British Intelligence officers planted the bullets so, after his arrest, they could get Columba to make contact with someone from the local area who security forces believed was providing safe passage to republicans escaping south of the border.

Although sentenced for a terrorist offence, on the inside, IRA prisoners didn’t recognise Columba as one of their own and, suspicious of his connections, regularly beat the teenager up for information. Oliver is previously quoted: ‘The British state set him up and the Provos finished him off.’

Stolen Life

Dympna describes how, over the years, people would go to their mother and say ‘I saw your Columba in Dublin’ and that would keep her going.

Dympna even thought she saw her brother at her local mass in St Helen’s three years after he went missing.

“My mother told me to go to all masses after that and to sit at the back so the next time I could get out of my seat in time to speak to him.

“These things kept her going. Mum put a picture on it and if you suggested he might be dead she would’ve gone beserk,” Dympna says of the dynamic within her family through the unknowing years.

Her father, on the other hand, was a quiet man who kept his counsel. “I think daddy would’ve felt something isn’t right; Columba needed my mum too much to stay away on his own accord, but my father knew mum wouldn’t have listened to that.”

The sadness comes from deep within Dympna when she tries to understand what their mother was put through.

“Columba was my brother, but he was my mother’s son, which, is very different,” Dympna said, “and sometimes when I try to put myself in my mother’s shoes and imagine one of my own children missing it hurts too much. I don’t know how my mum coped.”

Dympna also revealed to the shocking fact that a few years after Columba disappeared and was murdered, letters arrived for him to their family home including one acknowledging his “recent” application to join An Garda Síochána.

“He couldn’t have applied for the guards because he was already dead, but we didn’t know that at the time,” Dympna said.

And even more shockingly, the families of some of the other Disappeared also report receiving similar items.

“I suppose it was to keep you guessing, to keep you from the truth. A lot of other families got something to believe their loved one was still alive,” Dympna said of the callous move.

“I don’t know why anyone would torture families like that,” she added.

Digging with hope

“Do you know how many acres there are in Bragan Bog?” Dympna asks about the area of peatland in Monaghan where her brother is reportedly buried. “2,357,” she answers her own question, “so it really is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Seven searches since 1999 including two by An Garda Síochana and the remainder by the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) have dug up approximately 26 acres of bog without success.

“We are so, so lucky – and I mean that - to have the commission working for us,” Dympna says with gratitude.

“When a search ends and is not successful they are so deflated and heartbroken with you. They’ve become friends,” Dympna says of the forensic archaeologists, ICLVR investigators, digger drivers and guards involved in searches. Even retired investigators contacted Dympna on the 50th anniversary (October 31) with “lovely messages”.

She told the Celt how ICLVR remain committed to finding Columba, and says the last area of Bragan Bog they searched just before Christmas was in a different location to where they had previously dug. She described how a path leads from the road to this latest site.

“The ground has been disturbed each time there has been a dig, which, makes things more difficult,” she explained. “They have a lot of work, like testing, to do before a dig. The area is then cordoned off. Archaeologists observe as the earth is scooped out, they are looking for certain signs and then the dig is continued by hand.”

So far, the dig that just ended has been the toughest for Dympna.

“It was the 50th anniversary. We had a memorial mass in Donaghmore and I was convinced that finding Columba would be my Christmas present this year.”

Dympna says the families of the Disappeared pray for those with information using a special prayer written for them. Today though, she worries that “there are only three people alive who knew Columba” speaking of herself and her two brothers.

When asked what message she has for those with information that could help find her brother’s remains, Dympna had this to say: “Do you know what it’s like living a life like this? I know what life in a torture chamber is like even though I’ve never been in a torture chamber.

“We are all coming near the end of our lives. The people who did this were Columba’s age and older. If they carry a secret like that it just makes their deathbed harder.

“How would you feel watching your mother suffering like we have had to watch our mother? I used to look at my son who was the image of Columba and think ‘how has she coped?’”

And, speaking to everyone from a former girlfriend, to a person who overheard a conversation in a bar or the friend of a friend, Dympna impresses upon those people that they may hold that missing piece of information, which although might seem insignificant so many years later, could bring about the breakthrough her family and investigators are desperate for.

“Make that phonecall,” Dympna Kerr pleaded.

“That phonecall is confidential. The ICLVR has a proven record for treating all information in the strictest confidence. The information is only ever for the recovery of the Disappeared.”

To anyone directly involved in the disappearance and death of her long-lost brother Dympna said: “You won’t face consequences. There will be no judgement. You’ll set yourself free.”

Returned to his parents

In 2007, Vera McVeigh died age 82 and, as arranged, was buried beside her husband, Paddy. Columba’s name is already engraved on his parents’ headstone awaiting his burial between them.

“My mother always said: ‘Bury him on top of your father, then I’ll go in on top of Columba and then he’ll be safe between us and never be in trouble again.’

Vera left her rosary beads and instructed they be placed in her eternally teenage son’s hands when he is finally laid out in the coffin picked for him.

“When I look back to the day she died, I would say she died a happy woman,” Dympna says in a surprising change of tone.

“A scan showed there was a lot of damage after she had a stroke, but I was with her and just minutes before she died a tear rolled down her cheek and I know she saw Columba. It was a tear of joy,” Columba ’s older sister told the Celt.

Columba McVeigh’s family will meet with the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) this month to discuss next steps.

The current head of ICLVR, Eamonn Henry, has went on record multiple times to say the commission remains fully committed to finding Columba.

“We will not rest until his remains are returned and he receives the Christian burial that he has been denied for far too long,” he said.