It’s emotive stuff. A six-year-old girl goes missing. Searches are carried out, tearful pleas for help are broadcast, and then, nothing. For years. And years. 

It turned into the country’s longest-running missing person’s case: that of Mary Boyle, a six-year-old girl, who disppeared from a rural part of Donegal nearly forty years ago. Boyle’s disappearance is the subject of a documentary, made by Gemma O’Doherty, entitled Mary Boyle: The Untold Story. Released on YouTube last week, it documents the details of this extraordinary case. It also suggests that a toxic mix of incompetence and corruption surrounded the case and prevented the truth from being established.

It makes for deeply unsettling viewing. In the first instance, there is the clear suggestion that the perpetrator is alive and well and living in Donegal – seemingly untouchable. The inevitable sense of disorientation induced by that thought is heightened by the fact that the documentary is broadcast on YouTube, and not RTE or TV3. Which begs the question: why? 

Two competing narratives have emerged in the case, which has split the Boyle family, almost certainly irreparably. The story long accepted officially by the Gardaí, as well as by Mary Boyle’s mother, Ann Boyle, Mary’s uncle Gerry Gallagher, and most of the media, is that Mary must have been abducted by a stranger. Where she was taken or if she is alive or dead remains a mystery – though almost no one can credibly claim that they believe she is still alive. 

The other narrative, which has been championed by the singer Margo O’Donnell (a distant cousin of Mary Boyle’s father) and is now supported by Mary’s twin sister, Ann Doherty (nee Boyle) and, critically, by the two now-retired gardai who originally investigated the disappearance, is that Mary was killed by someone she knew, a person who is still alive and living in the area. The two sides do not speak to each other, and there is no contact between Ann and her mother or uncle. Ann’s brother Patrick Boyle lives abroad and has made no public statements on the matter.

The facts that we know are bare. Mary Boyle went missing from her grandparents’ land after going for a walk across fields. According to accounts, she was following her uncle, Gerry Gallagher, who was returning a ladder to a neighbours’ house 800 metres away. He is the last person known to have seen her alive. He says Mary followed him as far as a flooded lane, at which point she turned around and headed back home. She was never seen again. 

It is clear from the beginning of the documentary which side of the argument The Untold Story is on. Gemma O’Doherty was contacted by the singer Margo O’Donnell, who is spearheading what she sees as a quest for justice on behalf of the dead child. O’Doherty, in turn, believes passionately that there is something seriously wrong with the way in which the investigation was carried out and ultimately ran aground. 

The gist of the allegations in the documentary are as follows: that Mary was murdered by someone “close to her”, and this murder was then covered up by a senior local member of the Gardaí, allegedly at the prodding of a local politician. What is clear – and compelling – is that the two, now-retired, Gardaí who initially investigated the case, are in no doubt that Mary Boyle was murdered – and that her killer is still living in the area. 
Indeed the implication is that it is an open secret, in that part of Donegal, who killed Mary Boyle and why. It is also widely believed that a politician contacted Ballyshannon Garda station and ordered that the Gardaí not arrest the main suspect – a belief that is backed up in the documentary by two of the investigating Gardaí, Sergeant Martin Collins and Detective Sergeant Aidan Murray. 

Interestingly, as far back as 1985, an RTE documentary made allegations of wrongdoing against the senior member of An Garda Síochána – now deceased – who is accused of interfering in the investigation. That programme highlighted a former Garda’s 17-page letter of complaint against this individual. It alleged there was “an old pals act” operating in the Ballyshannon district, where the Mary Boyle investigation was centred and that this made certain people “untouchable”. It also documented the close links the Superintendent had with Fianna Fail.
Ann Doherty, Margo O’Donnell and the two retired Gardaí, all seem equally perplexed at the lack of current Garda interest in the case, and the fact that the chief suspect has never been formally arrested and subjected to the kind of intensive questioning which that allows. 

Is there any plausible explanation as to why Mary might have been killed? In the documentary, her sister Ann says that she believes that Mary was being sexually abused, and that she was killed after she told her abuser that she was going to reveal what he was doing to her. 
This theory remains strictly in the realm of speculation. No evidence has been uncovered that might give potential legal weight to such an interpretation of events. Then again, if the investigation had been approached with greater conviction, more evidence might have been accumulated.

The documentary reveals a number of inconsistencies in accounts of what happened after she disappeared. In 2000, in an RTE interview, Gerry Gallagher said Mary had followed him to a flooded lane and then turned around and walked back towards the house. Garda Martin Collins observed in The Untold Story that it was difficult to believe Mary could have scaled the three walls between the grandmother’s house and the neighboour’s without help.

According to her statement to Gardai in 1977, Mary’s mother Ann said that when she realised that Mary was missing, she ran outside the house, shouting her name. She said that Gerry Gallagher, who was in front of the house at the time, remained silent. In her statement she told the Gardaí: ”Gerry didn’t mention to me at any time that Mary was missing and didn’t tell me that she was with him, until he had the first search carried out.”
In his account, Gerry told Gardaí that he took Charlie Boyle’s car (Charlie was Ann’s husband) to look for Mary, but this is contradicted by Ann, who told Gardaí she drove the car alone, calling into a neighbours’ house to enquire about Mary.
According to Sergeant Martin Collins, it took two hours for the Gardai to be contacted. The alarm was raised by two nearby anglers, who had earlier been asked by Ann Boyle if they had seen her daughter. Both Anne Boyle and Gerry Gallagher have been consistently been opposed to any inquiry into the killing. 

It is also revealed that the authorities had decided that Mary Boyle’s mother would be the only point of contact in relation to the case. Ann Doherty and Margo O’Donnell have repeatedly been ignored by the gardaí and by politicians in general. They appealed, to no avail, for the case to be reopened to an Taoiseach Enda Kenny and the Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald.
However, that there is cause for disquiet is clear. People are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but anyone who watches the documentary will be left in no doubt who the main suspect is. The video was briefly taken down from YouTube, after potentially defamatory statements were posted in the comments section. The video was back online hours later, with the comments section closed. 
At the time of going to press it had been watched more than 120,000 times. You have to wonder: is the Minister for Justice among those who have viewed it and thought: we really have to get to the bottom of this.

Mary Boyle: The Untold Story is not just about the case itself; it is also about the media’s role in it. Gemma O’Doherty questions why the official narrative – that Mary Boyle was kidnapped by a stranger – has been so widely accepted. This was the line the Gardaí were pushing for years afterwards, linking her disappearance to a Sligo man who was arrested (and released without charge) in 2005, and a Scottish sex offender, Robert Black. But how credible is that? There is, it seems, no evidence that Black was even in the country at the time of the murder. 

In fairness to the Gardaí, cases like this, where there is no forensic evidence, are notoriously difficult to unravel. Until recently, who would have associated Eamon Cooke with the disappearance of Philip Cairns? That case is salutary in other ways: the back garden of the family home was dug up on a number of occasions, reflecting a clear sense that the Gardaí believed that the 13-year-old had been murdered by someone in his immediate family. The information that digging was taking place in the garden was leaked to the media and, thus, the finger of suspicion pointed at family members, damaging their reputation individually and collectively, and leaving a black cloud hanging permanently over them. Which leads to one conclusion that is fundamental: people really are fully entitled to the presumption of innocence until they are proven guilty. All of that said, in the documentary RTE is accused of merely parroting the ‘official line’, that Mary Boyle was killed by a stranger. Its 2012 documentary about the case, Cracking Crime, was made with the assistance of the Gardaí, the very body that Ann Doherty accuses of cover-up and corruption. RTE declined to show Mary Boyle: The Untold Story.

O’Doherty’s own treatment by the media is an interesting story in itself – and she has clearly been deeply disillusioned by it. For her trouble, she learned directly about the existence of an old boy culture within the Gardai. 
O’Doherty was chief features writer with the Irish Independent, where she worked for 16 years. In 2013, she was sacked. She believes that it was as a result of an exposé she wrote about the fact that Martin Callinan, then Garda Commissioner, had had speeding points wiped for a number of individuals.

Having been shown the door by the Independent, O’Doherty subsequently sued for unfair dismissal, and was paid compensation and received an apology from Independent News & Media. 
As O’Doherty said after she won her case: “Journalists have an obligation to hold power to account, be it An Garda Síochána, Dáil Eireann, the health service or other institutions of the state.” With more and more of Ireland’s media being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, how likely is it that the country’s media will challenge the authorities?

Presumably, then, we can expect more documentaries like Mary Boyle: The Untold Story in the future: a journalist, ignored by the mainstream media, writing and producing her own documentary and distributing it for free, something that would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. 
None of this matters much to Ann Doherty or to Margo O’Donnell. It is the mysterious death of Mary Boyle that eats them up.

For their part, the Gardaí have said that the case will be re-examined by the Serious Crime Review team. But no one is likely to invest much faith in the Gardaí. The one bright spot to emerge from all of this is that ‘rogue’ journalists such as Gemma O’Doherty can now have their voices heard outside of the mainstream media. Whether the momentum will be enough to bring closure to the Mary Boyle case remains to be seen.