The parents of Ireland's longest-missing person have said that, after years of living in hope that she was still alive, they now accept she was probably dead within hours of being last sighted.
Mary Boyle, from Kincasslagh, Co Donegal, vanished 27 years ago tomorrow and is still officially listed as a missing person.
Her family will say special prayers for her, as they have every St Patrick's week since she disappeared on March 18th, 1977.
Her mother, Ann, said in an interview to be published in Woman's Way magazine today, that they pray Mary's remains will be found.
Mrs Boyle says: "If Mary is found dead I know it will be only bones by now.
"There's no use in thinking there would be a body. But at least she would have a grave to go in, and that would be a big help."
Mrs Boyle's acceptance that Mary may no longer be alive developed gradually over a number of years.
She added: "If Mary was still alive she would have been thinking like an adult. She would have known what her absence all those years would have been doing to her natural family.
"She would have done everything she could to get back to us.
"I now believe that by the evening of the day she disappeared, Mary was no longer above ground."
The year Mary vanished, the family was on a St Patrick's Day visit from their home in Kincasslagh to relatives 50 miles south, in Cashelard, Co Donegal.
Mary, who was three months short of her seventh birthday, was last seen following her uncle, Mr Gerry Gallagher, across some boggy land as he carried a borrowed ladder back to a neighbour.
Mr Gallagher was the last person to see her alive. He has told how when he still had 70 yards to go to the neighbour's house, Mary turned round to head back on her own to her grandparents' home.
She never arrived back at the house. Intensive Garda investigations over the years failed to establish what happened.