Cruelty of phone calls claiming they had Philip
Sister tells of pain felt by family after sick calls about missing brother
THE eldest sister of missing Irish schoolboy Philip Cairns has appealed for information to unlock the truth of what happened to her 13-year-old brother as time is running out for the family.
At the centre of one of the nation’s most high-profile missing person cases is the Dublin family who have had to endure unimaginably cruel phone calls from people claiming to have taken the child in the years since he disappeared.
In a new RTÉ Scannal documentary, Mary Cairns poignantly tells how part of her life has stood still since he went missing without trace 34 years ago.
Decades on, the pain of years of waiting and wondering what happened to the thoughtful young boy in the middle of an ordinary school day is etched on his sister’s face.
‘If anybody knows anything about what happened to Philip, I will ask you to please, please come forward. We don’t know how much time any of us has left,’ said Mary on the RTÉ documentary. ‘We would really like to be able to bring Philip home, give him a burial and somewhere for our mother to go where she knows where he is.’
On October 23, 1986, Philip went to Coláiste Éanna Secondary School in Rathfarnham like any other day before returning to his home on the nearby Ballyroan Road for his lunch at 12.45.
The youngest of six children left the house at 1.30pm and was never seen again.
‘When we actually went out looking for him it became very real that something had happened,’ said Mary, who was actively involved in the search. ‘Walking down by the river thinking, “what am I looking for here?’”
The new Scannal documentary forensically re-examines the intensive Garda investigation, extensive searches, numerous appeals and rewards in the unsolved case.
Behind the public police case, which has been compared to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, is the trauma endured by the family which has been exacerbated by sick calls to their home.
‘People ringing maybe to say what they had done to Philip… where his body could be found,’ recalls his eldest sister.
‘People saying that they had Philip in the background and someone screaming in the background.’
The documentary looks in detail at the Garda leads, the rumours and speculation that surrounded the case in a bid to get fresh information.
‘There were a lot of conspiracy theories floating around about paedophile rings, religious cults and things like that,’ said retired Garda detective Gerard Lovett, who lived in Rathfarnham.
‘These rumours don’t help the Garda Síochana and neither do they help the family.
There is a chance that someone who knows something about the case might be watching this programme.
‘What I’d say to them now is it is time to tell someone their story and to give a measure of comfort to the family of Philip Cairns.’
In June 2014, after 28 years of tireless campaigning, Philip Sr died without ever knowing what happened to his youngest child.
‘Of course, it was very difficult especially when my dad was dying, knowing he was never going to find out what happened to Philip,’ said Mary.
Her father, a deeply private man, found it very difficult to give interviews about his son but his daughter said: ‘He did it and he did it as best he could.’
Mary wants to find peace for her mother, Alice.
‘I would feel that he is dead.And for my mum, who is kind of on her own with it all now, it would be just for her to be able to say goodbye with Philip in the way she would like and to know what happened to him. ‘[This] is why it’s really important to us to keep Philip’s memory alive. I mean your life moves forwards in some respects… but then there is just this part of our life that has stood still.’ Scannal - Philip Cairns, The Boy Who Never Came Home, RTÉ One this Tuesday at 7pm.
‘We don’t know how much time any of us has left’
‘It is time to tell your story for Philip’s family’
likes to grumble, loves to scoff about all of the cats who ripped him off – the soul singer’.
I tell Scott that reminds me of a song Morrison recorded in 1986 called A Town Called Paradise, where he sang: ‘Copycats ripped off my words. Copycats ripped off my songs. Copycats ripped off my melody.’ He disparaged Paul Brady, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seeger at the time and as The Waterboys were huge in that period and used to cover songs such as Sweet Thing by Morrison, did he feel he too was the subject of Morrison’s ire?
‘I do know he said some very nice things about us in interviews around at that time.
‘Van the Man has never accused us of ripping him off as far as I know which is good because we never did,’ Scott says. ‘I remember that song [A Town
Called Paradise] and I always thought it was rather an ungracious song. I thought he was very unfair to Paul Brady.’
Scott then reminds us that every artist Morrison included, whether they care to admit it or not, owes something to someone else. ‘If you listen to people like John Lee Hooker you can see where Van Morrison got a huge amount of inspiration,’ he says.
‘The way he [Morrison] sings, the voice and the tone he puts on; I don’t think anyone should be accusing other people of ripping
them off. Dion Fortune wrote a book in 1934 called Avalon Of The
Heart and I can think of a Belfast singer who ripped off that title for one of his songs and never gave her credit for it.’
(Avalon Of The Heart was a track on Van Morrison’s 1990 album Enlightenment.)
The avuncular 61-year-old is sanguine about songs of his own going out into the world and returning with another artist’s individual stamp on it. Ellie Goulding’s version of The Waterboys’ How Long Will I Love You?
Went to No3 in the British charts in 2013 after featuring in the Richard Curtis film About Time and having been chosen for that year’s BBC Children In Need appeal.
‘I like when people do my songs, especially when they make it their own,’ he says.
‘One of my favourites is Prince’s version of The Whole Of The Moon, he turned into this funk track, I loved it.’
Now living in Dublin, Scott still tries to make time to visit the south west and west of Ireland, places that captured his heart after he first visited there in the mid-1980s.
He honours an area he describes as ‘like the border between the human world and fairyland’ on this album with Postcard From The Celtic Dreamtime.
‘It is hard to say why I love that part particularly but Galway is an immensely convivial town,’ he says. ‘Galway Bay is a great trysting place between different worlds. It’s between old Europe and what must have seemed like the end of the world before America was discovered.
‘It’s also the break between Connacht to the north and Munster to the south. It’s a place of confluences, endlessly fascinating to me. It just feels like home when I’m there.’
Although, he confesses, he picked up very little of the Irish language in one of its spiritual homes, its cadences were familiar to him from a young age.
‘My grandmother was a [Scots] Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Mull in Scotland,’ he says.
‘She was one of a family of 12 and when she was in her late teens she and her family moved to Glasgow, where very few people spoke Gaelic.
‘She never went back to live in Mull and her children didn’t have the Gaelic language.
‘I always felt that that Gaelic experience was lost. When I first went to Connemara and Spiddal, I noticed the place names and heard the language that people spoke, it was the same [type of] consciousness, the same culture that had been lost when my grandmother moved to the Lowlands of Scotland.
‘In a sense it was a rediscovery, of me reclaiming that, even though I’ve never learned Irish, just certain words and phrases. It was a big experience for me to still find that world still intact, still thriving, an adventurous dream space.’
Scott is the constant throughout The Waterboys’ 37 years of musical adventures. Steve Wickham, Sharon Shannon and Joe Chester are just a few of the Irish musicians who have played under The Waterboys banner.
Anto Thistlethwaite, Karl Wallinger (later of World Party) and Robbie Williams’ co-writer Guy Chambers are others among the large number who have come and gone. I ask him as we end our conversation, is he a man who finds it easy to say goodbye?
‘Sometimes I don’t find it hard at all. Karl was a great musician but he was also a very difficult guy to have in the band,’ he says.
‘When he announced he was moving on, that wasn’t hard, that was a relief.
‘Then you get someone like Anto Thistlethwaite who was a fantastic, long-standing band member, deep with me in the conspiracy of it all, but we came to a point where Anto and I realised that we’d explored every avenue together but couldn’t see anymore. That was a very difficult decision. It took me a year for me to say to Anto, “I think I need to go on my own mate.” I loved him as a guy.
‘I was so glad when he came back for the Fisherman’s Blues Revisited tour and I would still like to work with him.
‘I’m always on the lookout for new people, new experiences and to widen my learning but I also like to live in the present moment, that’s where the action is.’
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The Waterboys – Good Luck, Seeker is out now.
‘Prince turned The Whole Of The Moon into a funk track, I loved it’
‘Karl was a great musician but he was very difficult to have in the band’