Geoff Knupfer

So I think that, you know, common sense probably prevailed eventually and they thought this wasn't getting anybody anywhere.

Whether it was done because they were frightened of the forensic consequences or not, I'm not at all sure.

If you look at the history of Ireland, you know, you can go back...

Countless years certainly to the beginning of the 20th century You know, there's the Civil War period and the War of Independence period when there were lots of people disappeared So it was this wasn't something new in the 1960s and 70s and 80s I suppose it had happened before and you could argue that that's probably where the Republican paramilitaries took their cue from what had happened previously and

Yeah.

Well, I think it was a bit of a culture shock.

I mean, I'd been in the police and I knew what had been going on from 1968 to 1998.

But the depth of the conflict, I suppose, the despair of the families, particularly the families that had disappeared,

It was horrifying, really.

And they'd been kept in the dark, you know.

This thing had happened to their loved ones, but nobody had actually told them what had happened or why it had happened.

And even to this day, I mean, there are some of those cases where the families have not the faintest clue why their loved ones were abducted and killed.

Yeah, as the years have gone by, this figure of 17 has cropped up.

There's a very interesting book on the disappeared by a guy called Podrick O'Rourke, who has done the history of the disappeared all the way back to the year dot.

And he probably would correctly say there were more than 17.

But I think those 17, or the others that he's talking about, have been recovered over the years.

So the commission was faced with a number of 17.

So really what I'm trying to say is,

Probably not the definitive list, but a pretty, a reasonably accurate list.

And of those 17, 13 have now been recovered.