The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

Don’t take a lift. Don’t trust strangers. Don’t wear that. Like it’s your own responsibility.

And in 1992, the year before the first disappearance, a fourteen-year-old girl was placed under house arrest by the state, to stop her leaving Ireland to have an abortion. She had been raped by an older man who later went on to attack another young girl.

we expect a certain type of woman to go missing, to be murdered. Not women like us.

We weren’t worried about being abducted by strangers in cars – what we worried about was being accidentally shot by the soldiers who crouched in the hedgerows as we walked home.

Is there no onus on these men, you know, not to do it?

2007 survey found that Ireland was the third most homophobic country in the western world. Northern Ireland was the second.

abortion only became legal in 2020,

When I was a teenager, we knew sex was something to be afraid of. We knew we’d be judged for it, and that it might even kill us in the end.

We don’t tell them how to avoid getting into relationships with men who will break their bones and bite their flesh, leave them too terrified to escape.

So maybe Crerar, or Murphy, or both together. Or else each woman was killed by a different person, who has somehow managed to cover it up all this time. I can’t decide which would be worse.

That violence against women was on his mind, within his world view.

of the over 200 women murdered violently in Ireland since records started in 1996, 87 per cent of them knew their killer. In 2019, five women were violently murdered in Ireland, three by their partners, and one by her son. The fifth was also reportedly killed by a man she knew.

It’s still a country that reflects deep hatred and contempt towards women, even as it worships them in the form of the Virgin Mary, the spotless mother.

You can’t hold back progress, not when the people want it enough.