The disappearance of Dublin teenager Philip Cairns almost 40 years ago remains among the most high-profile missing people cases in Ireland.
Philip (13) was last seen by his family when he left home in Rathfarnham to return to school after his lunch break on October 23rd, 1986.
Cairns featured in the news again this week after the death of his mother Alice was announced.
Mrs Cairns died “suddenly but peacefully” on Tuesday, according to her death notice. She was predeceased by her husband, who died in 2014 and was also called Philip.
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She had campaigned for years seeking information about her son, but she died without knowing what happened to him.
Many theories have since been advanced as to what happened to the schoolboy. However, four decades later, more questions than answers remain.
In 2016, 30 years after her son disappeared, Mrs Cairns told RTÉ she had only recently, since her husband’s death, started to accept that her son was not coming back.
“It’s only in the last year or two that I have come to terms [with the fact] that he won’t be coming back,” she said.
“It was all the time on my mind. For a long time, we didn’t talk about him; it was too painful. Life had to go on with five other children.
“I always hoped to hear from someone somewhere. My husband was always waiting and hoping, and gave up much quicker than I did. But he held out hope for years.”
What happened to Philip?
October 23rd, 1986, started out like any other day in the Cairns family life.
Philip, then 13, returned home from his new school, Coláiste Éanna in Rathfarnham, for lunch. At about 1.30pm, he left the family home on Ballyroan Road to make the short journey back to school on foot.
He never got there.
When he didn’t come home from school later that day, his mother went to some of his friends’ houses but nobody had seen him.
The family hoped he was simply running late but, as the hours passed, reality set in.
Gardaí soon launched a missing people appeal and a wide-scale search.
The country was shocked by the disappearance of a child in broad daylight, so close to home.
Six days after Philip’s disappearance, his schoolbag was found in a laneway near Coláiste Éanna. Some of Philip’s books were missing from the bag.
The laneway in question links Anne Devlin Road and Anne Devlin Drive in Rathfarnham. This area had previously been searched by gardaí, indicating the bag was later intentionally placed there by someone.
Numerous theories have been put forward over the years as to what happened to Philip.
In 2002, the Sunday Independent published an article which claimed that he was being abused by somebody outside his family and was murdered.
Speaking in 2015, his brother Eoin said this article “distracted people from coming forward or thinking back about connections, maybe something strange they noticed”.
“From what I believe, journalists had undertaken the research, not gardaí. The gardaí are open to pursuing any lines of inquiry – I would imagine they investigated these allegations,” Eoin told The Journal at the time.
The case made headlines again in 2016, when a woman claimed that convicted paedophile Eamon Cooke, the former owner of pirate station Radio Dublin, was involved.
The woman witness, who was aged nine at the time of the disappearance, claimed she saw Philip lying injured on the ground in Radio Dublin’s studio on the day he disappeared.
The witness, herself a survivor of abuse, gave a statement to Gardaí in 2016.
By that time Cooke was out of prison – he was serving a sentence for historical child sex abuse – and was dying of cancer in a hospice in Raheny, north Dublin. Cooke died in June 2016.
Others have cast doubt on Cooke’s alleged involvement in the case.
In 2020, Philip’s eldest sister Mary said the family was aware of the potential link to Cooke “a long time before it came out … but ultimately the timeline didn’t match”.
In an RTÉ Scannal documentary at the time, she said her brother was “a kind and thoughtful child who got on with everyone”.
Mary said the family wanted to bring Philip home so they could bury him.
“Your life moves forward in some aspects … but then there is just this part of our life that has stood still.
“We would really like to be able to bring Philip home, give him a burial.”
In 2016, Alice Kearns said she chose to focus on her son rather than the person who took him.
“I just focus on Philip. I wonder what he’d be doing now ... It’s very hard to know how there can be a happy ending,” she said.
In a previous appeal for information, gardaí said people who may have information about Philip’s disappearance “for whatever reason did not come forward” at the time.
However, they noted that, “following the passage of time and changing circumstances, these people may now be in a position to assist us”.
- Anyone with information is asked to contact Rathfarnham Garda station on 01 666 6500, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or any Garda station.
