The search for a bag in a laneway in 1973 resulted in a gruesome discovery, writes Uinsionn Mac Dubhghaill.
The search for infant remains in Dalkey may finally shed some light on a mystery which has haunted my dreams for the past 32 years.
In 1973, when I was an 11-year-old boy growing up in Dún Laoghaire, a friend and I stumbled upon the corpse of a newborn infant which had been brutally murdered and dumped in a laneway off George's Street in the heart of the town.
We were on our way to the harbour to gather seaweed for the garden. We needed a bag to carry the seaweed. We looked in the laneway for a bag and made the gruesome discovery.
The baby had been wrapped in newspapers and was soaked in blood. More than a dozen wounds covered the upper torso and neck.
I burst into tears and raced home with my friend to tell my parents. They alerted the gardaí. That night, and for several nights afterwards, my mother gave me pills to help me sleep.
The pills helped, but the memory remained. The gardaí were unable to establish the identity of the infant, or contact the mother, and there the matter rested until the mid 1990s.
In 1995, a woman who came originally from Dalkey but was then living in England contacted the gardaí in Dún Laoghaire and said she was the mother of the dead infant. The investigation was reopened. Word reached The Irish Times, where I was a journalist, and I recognised the connection.
I wrote a short piece about finding the baby, which was published in the newspaper the next day. The mother in England read the article and contacted me. She later agreed to be interviewed. A detailed report based on the interviews was published in the newspaper shortly before Christmas 1995. In her interviews the mother described how she was subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse at her family home in Dalkey while she was a girl in her early teens. She became pregnant, and when the child was born it was taken from her and brutally slain, before being dumped in Dún Laoghaire.
Following the 1995 investigation, a file was sent to the DPP. In November that year, he informed gardaí that he had decided not to press murder charges or begin any other prosecutions based on the allegations of sexual abuse.
His reasons included the considerable length of time which had elapsed, and the difficulty of securing a conviction as a result. Other reasons included the lack of independent evidence and any admission of guilt.
My hope is that these latest developments may ultimately help a Dalkey girl, whose life was devastated in the 1970s, to find some kind of closure.