THE BODY of missing teenager Conal Owens was discovered beside a sea wall in Co Wexford yesterday.
The grim discovery was made a couple of hundred yards from where a second missing man was located one week previously.
Mr Owens (18), from Kilteel, Co Kildare, was last seen alive on New Year’s Eve in the Curracloe area of Wexford county.
Yesterday, at 3:30pm, a man walking in the North Slob area (a few kilometres from Wexford town), by the sea wall, saw a body dressed in clothes matching those worn by the missing youth, adrift in the water.
A Wexford RNLI lifeboat arrived soon after and removed the body to the station by Wexford Bridge at 4.30pm from where the remains were transferred to Waterford Regional Hospital, where a postmortem will be carried out.
The 18-year-old rugby player was last seen at 11pm on New Year’s Eve, as he left the seaside house he was staying in with friends to walk to the beach at Curracloe.
He was wearing blue jeans and a distinctive red hooded sweatshirt with white writing on it.
In all, more than 1,500 people from Co Kildare and Co Wexford joined the search for him within a 10sq km area, including treacherous marshland and wooded areas, over the past five weeks.
The discovery brings closure for the Owens family: mother, Linda, father, Tony, (who is a coach with Naas rugby club), siblings, Jessica (20), Jared (17) and Genevieve (15).
Wexford Supt Kevin Gralton said: “People walking in the North Slob area had it in their mind to be on the look out for the missing men.”
Supt Gralton said it appeared that the body had just recently washed up.
He said it was extraordinary that both young men were discovered within a couple of hundred yards of one another.
He thanked the public for their help in searching for the young men.
The other body washed up had been found at 4pm on Wednesday, January 28th.
He was 20-year-old Michael (Mikey) Berry (who was a popular sportsman), of Ferndale Park, Wexford, and was found in a marshland area 500m north of the Pumphouse at the North Slob by a man who was out for a walk by the water.
It is thought Mr Berry was washed in on the tide and became wedged up against an embankment.
He had not been seen since late on the night of December 17th. His funeral at Bride St Church in Wexford was attended by over 1,000 people.