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The family of a GP who vanished 10 years ago and is presumed to have drowned in the sea say they want to meet gardaí to discuss a dig mounted for her in Co Donegal last week.
The garda search for Dr Deirdre O’Flaherty concluded on Friday with nothing found.
Dr O’Flaherty vanished on January 11th 2009, in Co Donegal where she was holidaying with her husband and three children.
Three years later she was officially declared deceased by the High Court in Belfast after it said it was satisfied she had entered the sea from a beach and died. Her remains have not been recovered despite a sea search off Kinnego Beach on the Inishowen peninsula where her car was found on the day she vanished.
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Dr O’Flaherty was originally from Belfast but had been working as a doctor in Strabane, Co Tyrone. She had also practised in Derry and Omagh under her maiden name Donnelly.
A statement issued on behalf of the Donnelly and O’Flaherty families on Sunday said they only had three days advance notice of the garda excavations near Milford last week and “therefore had little time to prepare for the consequences of the very public, national exposure of this story during the week”.
The exact location of the excavation was on a wind farm between Rathmullan and Kerrykeel on remote bogland popular with dog walkers.
The family statement said gardaí confirmed to them that the decision to conduct the excavation “in a remote area over fifty miles from her last known whereabouts flowed from an anonymous note handed in to a garda station in County Monaghan in August 2017. This note apparently provided precise map co-ordinates for the location of Deirdre’s remains. The families have not seen this note and this information was not made public due to the ongoing nature of the investigation”.
“Accordingly, the families have requested a meeting with the garda investigation team to discuss a number of questions relating to the conduct, conclusions and consequences of this investigation,” the statement added.
They expressed their gratitude for the many messages of support they received over what they said has been “a tumultuous and distressing week leading up to the 10th anniversary of Deirdre’s disappearance on the 11th of January 2009.”
“The families are relieved only because this ordeal is over although in our view, the outcome was not in doubt. Notification that gardaí were going to carry out a land search for Deirdre was entirely unexpected, not least given that the finding by order of Judge Deeney at Belfast High Court on the 12th of January 2012 that Deirdre had ‘gone into the water and drowned’ was supported by the oral evidence of the investigating garda sergeant. As far as the families are aware there has not in fact been any ongoing search for Deirdre since at least that time.”
Dr O’Flaherty’s case was the first one concluded before the courts in the North under new laws at the time. The system allowed for people who were missing and presumed dead to be legally declared deceased under a streamlined process.
Before then, families were obliged to wait at least seven years until a missing loved one could be declared dead. But under the new system Dr O’Flaherty’s family secured a declaration after three years.
She had suffered from depression and had been taking medication for it. That background, combined with the circumstances of her disappearance, meant the case was always regarded as a suicide.
In 2012, when the legal process for declaring her deceased was before the Belfast High Court, the judge was told she had left notes for her three children saying: “I will always love you xx Mum”.
When the dig concluded on Friday with nothing found, garda sources said officers in Donegal had felt duty bound to carry out the excavations. “When new information emerges, you feel you have to act on it,” said one source.
“If you don’t, there will always be a question mark about whether you missed a breakthrough in a case because you did nothing.”