The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

I wanted to find out why men who hurt women are so often protected and shielded by institutions. Why the police made so many mistakes. Ultimately, I wanted to know what kind of country Ireland really is.

It wasn’t until 1997 that divorce was legalised in Ireland, for example. It was illegal to be gay until 1993, a date that I always have to go back and check, because it can’t be true, it just can’t. It is, though. The last Magdalene Laundry, those abusive homes for pregnant girls, closed in 1996, although there was a mother and baby home open in Northern Ireland until at least 1998. 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.

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.

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.