The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

Not everyone wanted to live that way anymore, or put up with the hypocrisy of punishing women for straying, when men, even the men in charge of the Church, were allowed to get away with it.

Imagine knowing your rapist was out there in the world, not because the conviction fell through, but because no one had even bothered to look at the evidence yet.

Why had I never heard Eva Brennan’s name before? Why do some missing women get attention, posters everywhere, TV reconstructions, the FBI involved, and some get nothing? There is actually a term for this – missing white girl phenomenon.

Not just race but class plays a role too.

Ireland has the fourth-highest rate of suicide in Europe among young people, and at least one person kills themselves every day. Northern Ireland currently has the highest suicide rate in the UK.

Indifference can be fatal. Until we treat every case, every unsolved murder and every suspicious disappearance as equally important, we can’t hope to build up a true picture of what killers are doing. That’s how they get away with it.

the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland in 2012. It was an agonising case: she knew that she was having an unavoidable miscarriage and that she was dying too, and still nothing was done for her. She asked repeatedly for doctors to help hasten the miscarriage before she developed sepsis, but they refused, and so she died. Her terrible death in large part led to the overturning of the eighth and the legalising of abortion.

Peace has always been extremely fragile, as everyone in Northern Ireland knows and no one outside it seems to get.

that there’s a hierarchy of death. If you are beautiful, blonde, a mother, a married woman, then people will care about your murder. If you aren’t, you might be out of luck.