Eimear Rabbitt

His, I suppose what kind of raised concerns as well, he obviously never came home and his wife died.

called Gardaí but also they found his belongings his phone and his wallet and his car which obviously suggests that he wasn't planning to go anywhere so there was a massive massive searches obviously because as you said it's a thousand acre farm there's a lot of rough terrain around there's obviously a lot of volunteers people that liked Mike and people that were

very concerned.

We're looking as well as all of the different elements of the Gardaí, of search volunteers, search groups.

And this went on for eight weeks and they actually kind of, I suppose the kind of the tragic nature of how it ended up was that the whole time he was 50 yards from his car in a slurry tank.

It got lodged, yeah, the thing got stuck.

And then when they went to look, there was little bits of, was it bone fragments?

Yeah.

Yeah, our colleagues are reporting today in The Independent that he was dismembered.

They believe he was murdered in the cattle shed and dismembered and discarded in the slurry tank.

The slurry tank had been searched, but I suppose given the nature of the dismemberment, these body parts were in the actual slurry and they had been spread.

And it was obviously, as you said, a family member and a contractor were in the middle of spreading slurry and it got jammed in the machine.

So

So, yeah, the area had been searched, but I suppose once the parts were found, that's when Gardaí, I suppose, became to this theory that they believed that he had to have been... I know there was, you know, just lots of different... People have different knowledge of farming machinery and some people were trying to suggest that other things could have happened.

But I think the guard's theory seems to have landed on that he was dismembered and then put into the tank.

No.

Yeah.

And it was actually like the murder investigation, it was upgraded to a murder investigation before he was found, actually, because it was obviously whatever investigations Gardaí had done, there was no sign of him.

There was nothing, as I said, his belongings were there.

He obviously hadn't used any of his counts or anything like that.