Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains

The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR) was established by treaty between the United Kingdom Government and the Government of Ireland, made on 27 April 1999 in connection with the affairs of Northern Ireland.[1]

A number of people, referred to colloquially as The Disappeared, have gone missing in Ireland and France over the last thirty-five years, mainly in the 1970s. It is believed that they were abducted and killed by proscribed organisations, mostly the Provisional Irish Republican Army. To date several of the corpses have not been located. The Commission was established to locate the remains of these people.

Powers and functions

Its functions include receiving information as to the whereabouts of the remains of a victim of violence and disclosing such information for the purpose of facilitating the location of the remains to which the information relates.

Victims

The people named by the ICLVR as having been killed and buried in undisclosed locations are:[1][5][6][7]

Remains recovered

As part of the peace process the IRA passed information on the location of six graves containing eight bodies to the Commission. Using this information the bodies of John McClory and Brian McKinney were recovered on 29 June 1999 in County Monaghan.[9] The body of Eamon Molloy had been left in a graveyard in Dundalk the previous month.[10]

Jean McConville was discovered by accident on Shelling Hill beach near Carlingford in County Louth in August 2003. The IRA had previously said that Templeton beach, a short distance away, was the place of burial.[11]

The remains of Danny McIlhone were discovered near Ballynultagh in the Wicklow Mountains in November 2008[12] and formally identified using DNA analysis the following month.[13] There had been previous unsuccessful attempts to find McIlhone's remains in 1999 and 2000.[14]

In 2010 the remains of Peter Wilson, Gerry Evans and Charlie Armstrong were exhumed,[15] meaning that nine of the sixteen disappeared have now been recovered[16]

Commissioners

The current commissioners are Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and former Northern Ireland Victims Commissioner, and Mr Frank Murray, former Secretary to the Government (Cabinet Secretary) and former Chairman of the Irish Public Appointments Service,[17] who took over from John P. Wilson.[18][19]

See also

References

External links

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