Search for tragic Amy must be given priority
THE disappearance of 15-year-old Amy Fitzpatrick is one of the great unsolved mysteries of my lifetime.
Sixteen years after she vanished off the face of the earth as she walked home on New Year’s Day in the Costa del Sol, we are no nearer to finding her.
We have no idea if she is dead or alive. Her mother Audrey, stepfather Dave Mahon, dad Christopher Fitzpatrick and aunt Christine Keegan, who publicly campaigned to find her, are all convinced that something terrible has happened.
They are all collectively 99% convinced she is dead. As Audrey said on TV over the weekend, the chances of her being found alive are probably 1% at this stage.
All her heartbroken family wants to do is get to the truth, find her body and bring her home and give her a proper burial.
I have no doubt if Amy came from a posh southside Dublin family, no stone politically and diplomatically would be left unturned to find her.
They would be shouting from the rooftops of Merrion Square and the Dail about her.
But because she was a working-class kid from Donaghmede, her case has been ignored and not taken seriously for years.
The Spanish police dealing with the case, the normally highly-efficient Guardia Civil, have literally done little or nothing to find her since the first months of her disappearance.
Because they could find no physical evidence of a crime, and Amy’s teenage history as a bit of a rebel, they took a view that Amy had run away on her own accord.
They did not believe she was kidnapped or murdered and she was therefore put on a missing person’s list.
Amy had run away before from her mother and stepdad in Spain, but always returned after a couple of hours. She was said to be particularly angry at the time because her mother had stopped her from returning to Dublin to live with her dad.
Every time I contact the Spanish police, they say the file on her case is open and it is an ongoing investigation.
But the truth is they have repeatedly refused to put any resources in terms of staffing into the case because of the cost involved and have refused categorically to upgrade it to a murder investigation.
They say new evidence of a possible killing has to emerge before a local prosecutor in Fuengirola will agree to it.
I have been coming to Spain a long time and have worked on this story on and off for the last four years.
I can tell you if a Spanish child was unaccounted for in Ireland for 16 years and gardai were seen to be doing nothing, Spanish people would be boycotting Irish products by this stage and the Madrid Government would be going ballistic.
The Spanish, like us, love children. The thought of one of their own disappearing like Amy would stick in their gut.
Successive Irish governments’ approach to the whole Amy story from the get-go is to do and say little or nothing.
Officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs do not like to rock the boat.
They prefer to act quietly behind the scenes to try and get things done.
Sometimes this strategy works but in Amy’s case, it hasn’t.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar should be summoning the Spanish ambassador into his office and demanding a full-scale murder probe be launched on the Costa del Sol for the teenager.
We as a country can well afford to pay towards the cost if money is the stumbling block. Amy’s family believe a full cold case review will unearth new evidence.
They believe there are people on the ground in Spain who know what happened to Amy and up to now have been too afraid to talk.
If you speak to any Spanish cops in the local area like I have, they will all privately admit that Amy did not voluntarily disappear and more than likely she is now dead.
Her dad Christopher believes if Amy was alive she would have contacted him by now.
Amy’s best friend in Spain and the last person to see her alive, Ashley Rose, also believes the same.
She feels she has been so let down by the police and they never really took her disappearance seriously from day one.
Ashley also rightly says if it was a Spanish child who went missing they would have taken a completely different approach.
In the years since Amy vanished her older brother Dean, 23, was of course sadly killed.
His stepdad Mahon stabbed him after a row in their Dublin apartment in 2013.
He was sentenced to five years jail for manslaughter and claimed it was self-defence.
Mahon has always denied having any involvement in Amy’s disappearance and has his own theories on what happened to her which he elaborates on in a new book he has published.
He said he will regret what happened to Dean until the day he dies.
Amy’s mother has stood by Mahon and married her partner after Dean’s death.
She too also wants to know what happened to her little girl.
Every year thousands upon thousands of Irish families holiday on the Costa del Sol and spend millions in the local economy. The least the Spanish authorities can do as a gesture to our nation is make one massive big effort to find the one Irish person, Amy, who never came home.
Her family deserves answers.