the irish police force's delicate penchant for conveniently dead suspects in cases involving the kidnap rape torture and murder of missing persons

Irish police announced last week that they were investigating a tip off which implicated a possible suspect in the disappearance thirty years ago of schoolboy Philip Cairns.
The possible suspect, an IRA member with convictions for child abuse offences, called Eamon Cooke is of course conveniently dead. He had died a week before the police announcement.
I would ask you to bear in mind certain matters.
There is some evidence of gangland running pass defence for itself by feeding the police nonsense tips in such cases.
Even the IRA seems quite happy to implicate supposed IRA members who are conveniently dead or out of the country, or perhaps don't exist.
A few years ago a jailed murderer confessed to several of the high profile disappearances of women in the midlands area.
The mother of Fiona Pender, one of the missing women, was made of stern stuff and instantly headed off the false confession with the blunt statement: "I know who killed my daughter. And it wasn't him."
Fiona Pender, unlike most of the other midlands disappearances, was not murdered by a serial killer or a coven.
Fiona Pender and her unborn child are believed by investigators and by her family to have been murdered by her boyfriend. He was reported by the Sunday Independent newspaper more than a decade ago to have confessed the crime to an aunt of another missing girl from the town of Newbridge. He had called to the aunt requesting the aunt to identify the suspect in the Newbridge girl's disappearance and the Sunday Independent claimed he said to the girl's aunt: "I killed Fiona when I was hopped up on tablets." This piece of information has been quietly let die and no conviction has ever been secured against the boyfriend for his murder of Fiona Pender and her unborn child.
In the disappearance of Annie McCarrick a supposed IRA member has been the subject of what I call more "pass defence" nonsense tips.
The police officer who was for a long time in charge of investigating these cases at one stage claimed that he had information that an IRA assassin on the run in America had killed Annie McCarrick.
The theory propagated by this police officer was that the IRA man had gotten drunk and told Annie McCarrick about some of his killings. This indiscretion according to the police officer who never solved any of the missing persons cases he was dealing with, led the IRA man to murder Annie McCarrick.
I consider this theory to be balderdash.
This is the sort of tip the police officer should have been compelled to clarify.
If the IRA man is more than a myth, he should of course be extradited without delay and compelled to talk.
One of the most vexatious aspects with deliberately misleading tips (aside from those that emanate from police officers themselves) is that Irish police take no action against those they discover impeding investigations in this way.
A phone caller who impeded the investigation into the disappearance of the girl from Newbridge was never prosecuted even though the police identified him.
Incidentally the jailed murderer who attempted to impede the Fiona Pender investigation by frivolously confessing to killing her, also confessed to killing the missing Newbridge girl.
There are few people who believe there was ever any truth in his confessions.
The main suspect vis a vis missing persons cases of this type in the midlands area remains in the opinion of more respected Irish police officers, and in the view of FBI profilers, one Larry Murphy and his connections.
Murphy has been convicted in a case which involved him kidnapping, raping, torturing and attempting to kill a woman. (He tortured her by showing her pictures of his family so that she would know in advance he intended to kill her.)
He had hunted the woman as human prey, stalking her for months in advance of his attacks upon her.
A liberal Judge gave him a pattycake sentence and in spite of recommendations from law enforcement professionals against ever releasing him, the Irish government has given Murphy a formally issued passport permitting international travel, and set him loose on the people of Europe.
Murphy's cousin also has a conviction for murder.
The concerns about the Murphy family's predilections for kidnappings, rape and murder, are particularly germaine because within a week of announcing their nonsense tip off about a conveniently deceased IRA man in the Philip Cairns case, the Irish police have announced another such tenuous tip off in several other missing persons cases in the midlands.
Again the possible suspect is conveniently dead.
Again the tip off is of an indirect sort, coming from someone who claims to have been abused by a man who she then claims confessed several of the midlands killings to her.
Again the whole thing reeks of pass defence.