Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Know he was going up die? Columba was a know he’ll have cried
Sister’s pain on brother’s last moments before IRA killed him
inscribed on the back. She didn’t want him to be forgotten about.
“Whenever he will come, he will be put in here and then his name will be taken off the back and put on the front.”
She also left behind rosary beads, to put on Columba when he is found.
Dympna explained: “The very first search happened before she died. She went up and she left a pair of rosary beads, so when he is found, those rosary beads come on him before he comes out of that bog.”
Vera told Dympna: “Daughter dear, when I am no longer here, don’t let them forget about him.”
Dympna added: “I am now having the conversation with my kids as my mum had with me.
“I hope he is found in my lifetime. I want to walk behind that lad’s coffin and into Donaghmore chapel.
“I want to walk out behind it again and up to the graveyard in Donaghmore and see it lowered into the grave.
“I’m not saying I won’t have a tear in my eye but I would be the happiest woman alive, that we can do what our mother asked us to do.” Oliver said: “Columba always had a special place in my mother’s heart.
When we find his body, if we do find his body, I don’t know how I’ll react but I think of it every day.
“My mother went fighting until her last days trying to get Columba’s body in beside her and I am not giving up on it.”
The documentary hears Columba was a “happy go lucky” lad who was caught in the middle between the British forces, who thought he would know something about the Provos, and the IRA who thought he was a spy for British intellisame
gence. He moved to Dublin due to the tensions but went out one night for cigarettes and never came back.
His family thought he would turn up again but in 1999, the IRA said he’d been murdered and buried in the bog.
Oliver recalled telling his mother of his fate was “the hardest job I ever had to do in life”.
Six searches, the most recent in 2023, have so far proved unsuccessful. The Mcveigh family say any extra information could be the missing piece of the jigsaw.
Ar Iarraidh: Columba Mcveigh is on at 9.30pm tonight on TG4.
I want to walk behind his coffin and into chapel DYMPNA KERR AR IARRAIDH, TG4