FIVE years ago, an inquest was held in Cashel, Co Tipperary, on the body of a man called Thomas Kirby, discovered at Rossmore State Forest in September 1990.
The body, found in a shallow grave, was dressed in a British army uniform and because of the preservative qualities of the boggy soil, it looked like the corpse of a man recently dead. The inquest confirmed that the man had been shot.
From the trajectory of the bullets, it appeared that Thomas Kirby had been shot while stooping, probably digging his own grave. But the murder had happened, not in 1990 but in 1921. Though he was a local man, Thomas Kirby's uniform had been enough to have him condemned by the IRA as a "spy" and summarily murdered. The IRA had never bothered to tell his relatives where his body was.
Will it take another 70 years before the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries tell the relatives of people missing as a result of their activities where their bodies are buried? Will we have, in 2040, inquests on bodies found in the bogs and forests in Northern Ireland and the Border counties? If the Mitchell International Body has its way, we won't.
It has suggested that "the provision of information on the status of missing persons should be one of the ways in which the paramilitaries can build trust in the peace process. At the same time as the body was announcing its findings on, Wednesday, the RUC in Belfast was announcing that a number of people were being held for questioning in relation to an investigation into the location of the bodies of people who have been missing for many years.
Nobody knows how many bodies lie in shallow graves, unknown to anyone except their killers, their families denied the comforts of certainty and of a proper funeral. The RUC says that it is impossible to say with any accuracy what happened to a large number of missing people.
But it is actively seeking information about a substantial number of cases, most of them dating back to the 1970s, when violence was at its height. The bodies almost certainly include those of paramilitaries murdered as "informers" or dissidents by their own side, victims of sectarian killings, and undercover British agents. All of them had families and friends.
The Chilean writer, Ariel Dorfman, wrote of the disappeared of Latin America: "Taken from their homes in the dead of night or abducted in open daylight on the streets, these people are never seen again. Their relatives are left not just, without their loved ones, but without any certainty about whether they are alive or dead. The missing are deprived of more than their homes, their livelihoods, their children. They are also deprived of their graves. It's as if they had never existed."
In Chile and Argentina, it was the state that made people disappear. In Northern Ireland, it was the paramilitaries.
The people who killed them are themselves steeped in traditions of funeral and burial that are full of resonance and meaning. Their own funerals have always been solemn and ornate. They have held their graves with grim tenacity.
They have always been especially outraged at the desecration of the dead, the dishonouring of death itself that added an extra dimension of vileness to the IRA's massacre of people mourning their dead at Enniskillen, to Michael Stone's massacre of mourners at Milltown Cemetery in Belfast in 1988.
They know, with a knowledge that is both deep and exact, what it means for a death to go unmarked and unacknowledged. But they say, with Sophocles' Creon from Antigone:
"He was the enemy: my enemy and Thebes'. And therefore I want no mourning; I want him to be left unburied, to be devoured, as a meal, by dogs and vultures. I have no respect for the man who values human life more than his country."
As the Mitchell Body has acknowledged, peace cannot be built by simply forgetting about such things, by drawing a line under the past and pretending that, nothing happened. The issue of the missing bodies is important not just in itself but for the light it sheds on the underlying issues of trust and confidence.
If the paramilitaries cannot bring themselves to pass on information that would do the only thing that can be done to atone in any way for the deaths of 25 years, how can they be trusted on the more complex issue of arms? If the simple human gesture of letting relatives know where the bodies are buried is beyond them, what hope is there that the broader political compromises necessary for a settlement are possible?
THE poet, Michael Longley, reminded a conference in Belfast last year that "Concepts such as `a clean slate' or `drawing a line' are offensive. If we are not ever to know who bombed Enniskillen and Birmingham, Dublin and Monaghan, we can at least go on asking "Where are all the missing bodies of the last 25 years? Where have they been buried?".
Amnesty does not mean amnesia.
We have seen in Latin America how societies recovering from political violence remain haunted by unsolved disappearances, how groups like the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina have to keep silent vigils long after a supposed normality has returned. A willed amnesia leaves yawning gaps, dreadful absences that cannot be filled. And those gaps threaten all the time to undermine the foundations of peaceful stability.
There is nothing to stop the IRA and the UVF and the UDA from giving to any independent third party they choose the details of where bodies are buried. They don't have to surrender the murderers. They don't have to look again at the bodies of the dead and be haunted by their own deeds.
They don't even have to produce an explanation, or make a statement admitting guilt, Most of the relatives have long since given up any hope of justice or retribution. All they have to do is to point to some bits of ground, to provide the coordinates on a map where someone else can do the digging. It is not a lot to ask.
If they do so, they can make a gesture that is actually more significant than a token handover of arms. A funeral is, in every culture that there, has ever been, the most meaningful symbol of finality. It says with real solemnity that something is over forever, and marks that ending with a ritual of public acknowledgment.
And that sense of finality is precisely what is missing in the peace process. The nagging feeling that it is not all over, that the violence is merely dormant, is what really inhibits the development, of a peace process in which risk and generosity and a willingness to test new ideas might be possible.
Words and principles and declarations could help to create that sense of finality, and the Mitchell Body has indicated the form they should take. But the burial of the dead could do even more to signify the sense of ending, of the sorrow and dignity, the feeling of loss and the feeling that something has changed for good, that people have at the graveside. Until those feelings can be given substance in the most direct, the most human and the most obvious way, trust and confidence will remain buried and hard to find.