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A grave south of the Northern Ireland border has been exhumed by experts searching for the body of a former monk more than 50 years after he was killed and “disappeared” by the IRA during the Northern Ireland Troubles.
Joe Lynskey, a former Cistercian monk from Belfast who later joined the IRA, was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972, one of 17 victims who disappeared without trace decades ago.
All the victims were male, except Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 who is the subject of a new TV series based on the bestselling book Say Nothing.
The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) said a formal process would be undertaken to establish the identity of all the remains found in the grave in the village of Annyalla in County Monaghan.
The commission’s lead investigator, John Hill, said it had received information related to “suspicious historic activity” during the 1970s at a grave in Annyalla cemetery which supported some information the organisation has already received. He said the exhumation was a “very big step” and not something that was “done lightly”.
In a statement the commission said: “Both the timeframe and the location coincide with the disappearance of Joe Lynskey in 1972.”
The ICLVR did not become aware that Lynskey was one of the disappeared until 2010. A number of searches since then failed to locate his remains. The commission said the process of establishing the identity of the remains found in the grave “may take some time”.
The commission was set up by the UK and Irish governments during the peace process to investigate the locations of the victims’ remains.
McConville’s disappearance has been the subject of several books and a documentary, I, Dolours, in which the deceased IRA member Dolours Price detailed how she and two other IRA members were directly involved in her murder at a beach in County Louth in 1972.
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A new Disney series on her disappearance was condemned as cruel by her son last week.
As well as Lynskey, the commission also has the task of finding three other disappeared victims: the County Tyrone teenager Columba McVeigh, the British army captain Robert Nairac, and Seamus Maguire, who was in his mid-20s and from near Lurgan, County Armagh.
