TOP GARDA SAYS FAMILIES OF MISSING WILL GET ANSWERS

THE disappearances of Trevor Deely and schoolboy Philip Cairns will be solved, a senior garda believes.

- BY DANNY DE VAAL

Detective Chief Superintendent Colm Noonan, who leads the Missing Persons Unit, has said his investigators will never give up.

As part of this paper's Missed campaign, the head of the Garda National Protective Services Bureau also stressed how vital it is for the public to come forward with even the smallest piece of information

Trevor vanished on December 8, 2000, while walking home from his work Christmas party in Dublin at around 4am.

Schoolboy Philip, 13, was last seen on October 23, 1986, when walking back to Coláiste Éanna Secondary School in the south of the city.

Asked if the cases will be cracked, Det Chief Supt Noonan told us: "The simple answer is yes, because people don't go missing and are never seen again.

"Somebody knows something. Somebody has seen something. The reason I say 'yes' is because the guards and all the other people who are involved around missing persons - they just don't give up.

"There's some piece of information out there. The teams assigned to investigate will keep exploring every possible avenue.

"They're not going to say. 'Look, it's just too long. 'We're going to give up'. We'll keep pushing. We will do searches on sites.

"We will go to locations, we'll do extensive searches until there's no further actions left to do. The most simple piece of information could turn an investigation.

"So the appeal from us as always is just give us a shout. Contact us.

"If somebody was on holiday and they said, 'Oh, I thought I saw that person, or 'I saw their name in a newspaper in Australia', or 'I heard that they had died'.

COMFORT

"Within days, we can pick up the phone to our colleagues in any part of the world and say, 'Can you go to this address? Can you look up this car for us? Can you get the CCTV? We can pursue those lines.