Missing in Action

by Ralph Riegel

  There was certainly no apparent political decision made to ignore the matter. Rather it seems that Ireland’s first MIA fell victim to a combination of the traditional acceptance of the age, the geographic realities of where he died and the fact that Ireland was accelerating out of the de Valera era of economic deprivation into the heady world of 1960s expansion and growth overseen by Seán Lemass. For some strange reason, the Congo deployment was quickly associated with an old, fast disappearing Ireland, while Cyprus and Lebanon was part of the proud, new modernised nation.

  Undoubtedly, another key factor is that within a decade of Pat Mullins’ death and disappearance Ireland found itself dealing with ‘The Troubles’ and the increasingly vicious border battles between the resurgent IRA, Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British army. Faced with the threat of Northern Ireland tearing itself apart, the Defence Forces had more immediate priorities than the events of an African mission of a previous decade.

  Twenty years after Tpr Mullins vanished in the Congo, Ireland added a second name to its list of MIAs. The second incident centred on Ireland’s UN peacekeeping involvement in Lebanon. At the time, in the late 1970s, many wondered if the bloodshed in Lebanon would be as bad as it had been in the Congo. Lebanon, over the course of twenty-three years, proved to be far deadlier, with twenty-seven Irish soldiers killed in the country whose capital Beirut was once hailed as ‘the Paris of the Mediterranean’. Yet many army veterans believe that, but for the experience hard-won in the Congo, Ireland’s death toll in Lebanon could ultimately have been far higher.

  On 27 April 1981, Private Kevin Joyce (20) was on guard duty at a UN observation post in south Lebanon when he was kidnapped. He was never seen again and is now officially regarded by the Defence Forces as: ‘Missing in Action, Presumed Dead’. Despite hopes that the blossoming peace process in Lebanon might lead to information about where his remains are buried, no trace of the Inisheer-born soldier has been found to date.

  Ireland’s last UNIFIL battalion in Lebanon had made it one of their primary missions to obtain information about Pte Joyce’s burial site before Ireland, like other UNIFIL countries, withdrew their troops in 2001. In May of that year, Henry McDonald, writing in The Observer, revealed that the battalion was working with the Christian Maronite Bishop of Tyre as well as the Lebanese Minister for Missing and Displaced Persons, Senator Mirwan Hamadi.

  Crucially, for the first time Palestinians from refugee camps in south Lebanon agreed to discuss the possible location of Pte Joyce’s burial site – the first time anyone had ever admitted any knowledge about the missing soldier or the precise events of that fateful April day. In perhaps the ultimate irony, Pte Joyce’s kidnapper, Abu Amin Dayk, was himself condemned and executed by the Shia militia, Amal, for crimes against the Lebanese people. Dayk was hanged in May 1984.

  Back in 1981, Dayk had emerged as the leader of a hard-line Palestinian faction in the south Tyre area. He was Lebanese by birth but was determined to ‘earn his spurs’ with his Palestinian allies. Amid the chaos in Lebanon between 1978 and 1990, factions fought the Israelis, the Lebanese army and very often each other. They fought over politics, religion, territory, access to weapons and, in one notable case, over running water supplies.

  On 27 April 1981, Dayk and his militia decided to raid a UN position at Dyar Ntar, possibly in the hope of securing some heavy weaponry. But the raid quickly went wrong and one of Dayk’s men shot one of the two Irish UN peacekeepers on duty at the post. Pte Hugh Doherty was just twenty years old and was shot three times in the back, dying instantly. Pte Joyce was disarmed and was dragged away by the gang before UN reinforcements could arrive.

  Intelligence reports later revealed that he was taken to Tyre, ostensibly to facilitate negotiations over the price of his release. He was kept under armed guard in a house in a Palestinian refugee camp. Tragically for the Irish soldier, it was a time of escalating conflict between the various Lebanese-Palestinian factions and UN forces. A few weeks later a Palestinian militia ended up in a major gun battle with a unit of Fijian UN troops. The firefight erupted at Deir Amis and, as the Fijians bravely refused to withdraw from their positions, several Palestinian fighters were killed in a heavy exchange of rounds. Furious at having had men killed, the Palestinians demanded retaliation and Dayk’s gang was ordered to execute the Irish soldier captured a few weeks earlier in a tit-for-tat punishment. Pte Joyce was shot and his remains buried at a secret location.

  Initial Irish efforts to locate Pte Joyce were hampered by the chaos caused by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon a few months later in 1982. The UN – again caught like the meat in a sandwich – wouldn’t be able to re-open useful local lines of intelligence until 1983/84.

  Bizarrely, shortly before he was arrested by Amal, Dayk had a meeting with UN officials. The meeting was staged at Dayk’s specific request and UN officers suspected that he was trying to cut a deal whereby he would be granted safe passage out of Lebanon in return for information. One Irish UN officer shrewdly suspected that Dayk’s reign as a minor warlord was coming to an end and that his rivals and enemies were tightening the noose around him. Dayk clearly felt himself to be under threat. The Irish officer gave the following description of Dayk: ‘Dayk was in his mid-thirties. He was of slight build. He had black hair and spoke in a very deep monosyllabic tone. I remember during that meeting he appeared to be very nervous. You could tell that he was aware that his enemies were closing in. It was quite weird being in the same room as the man we suspected had been behind the Dyar Ntar attack. He was very uneasy during the meeting and he kept looking out the window. When people like Dayk sought a meeting with UNIFIL you could be sure their power was waning,’ the officer explained.

  The UN was eventually able to determine that, contrary to black propaganda and local rumours, Pte Joyce had indeed been executed in the Palestinian refugee camp. One bizarre rumour had previously claimed that he had changed sides and agreed to fight for a Palestinian faction. Another rumour had it that he was accidentally killed during a massive Israeli air strike on Palestinian positions near a refugee camp and his body was buried under a collapsed building.

  The Times’ then-Beirut correspondent, Robert Fisk, correctly assessed that the attack on the Irish UN post was as much about getting weapons as embarrassing Yasser Arafat, who had been desperately trying to maintain good relations with the UN. Fisk, in his superlative history of modern Lebanon, Pity the Nation, tracked down details of the young Irish private’s last lonely weeks before his death: ‘The soldier had been imprisoned in an underground cell beneath the Ein Halweh Palestinian refugee camp at Sidon but had (it was then claimed) been killed there when an Israeli air raid destroyed the bunker. Later, the Irish army would be told that he was taken not to Sidon but to Beirut where, after months of lonely imprisonment underground, he was coldly executed just prior to the 1982 Israeli invasion,’ Fisk wrote.

  In May 2001, the Joyce family travelled to Lebanon to try and offer first-hand assistance in the campaign to locate Kevin’s remains before the formal withdrawal of Irish troops as part of the UNIFIL mission. They were accompanied by the then-president of PDFORRA (Permanent Defence Force Other Ranks Representative Organisation), John Laffery. PDFORRA had taken a high-profile role in campaigning for every effort to be made to repatriate Pte Joyce’s remains and escorting the family was a gesture of their support.

  ‘This is a festering sore for the Defence Forces. Every soldier that has served in Lebanon over the past twenty-one years owes to Kevin Joyce that we do everything to find him. Talks are underway and we hope his remains can be found. All the Joyce family want is to take Kevin’s remains back to Ireland so he can be given a Christian burial on Inisheer,’ John Laffery told reporters in Lebanon. Tragically, as of 2010, Pte Joyce’s remains are still unaccounted for.

  It is interesting to note that between 1981 and 2000 the Irish media repeatedly focused on the case of Pte Joyce while inexplicably ignoring the fact that another Irish sol
dier had been ‘Missing in Action’ for almost two decades longer. A simple Internet search will underline the difference, with 4,670 hits for ‘Trooper Pat Mullins Congo’ in contrast to 27,800 hits for ‘Kevin Joyce Lebanon’. What is also noteworthy is that the overwhelming majority of posts in relation to Tpr Mullins have all occurred post-2005 when a determined campaign to highlight his case began to gain some interest within the Irish media.

  It is perhaps understandable that so much focus should have been on the kidnapping of Kevin Joyce given that it occurred in Lebanon, which, for innumerable reasons, was never out of the news headlines in Ireland. Lebanon also represents Ireland’s biggest and longest-running peacekeeping mission, which has contributed to making Joyce’s case so high profile. Another factor was that, thanks to intelligence work and investigative reporting, so much eventually emerged about the circumstances of Pte Joyce’s kidnapping and death. In Tpr Mullins’ case, after he was shot and killed on Avenue Drogmans/Boulevard Elisabeth, the trail goes cold.

  The contrast in the Irish media’s handling of the two cases over the past twenty years has also been marked. There were news reports updating the search for Kevin Joyce’s remains and an inquiry into precisely what had happened to him. RTÉ carried repeated reports in their main television news bulletin over a period of years. Sunday newspapers carried detailed analysis pieces on the factional fighting in Lebanon and who may have been responsible for the kidnapping. The decision to wind down the UNIFIL operation in Lebanon and the eventual withdrawal of Irish troops also spawned a series of articles on Ireland’s missing soldier and efforts to locate his final resting place.

  Yet, unwittingly, the reports ignored the plight of Ireland’s other MIA, Tpr Mullins. Pat Mullins had by then fallen so far under the radar that one British newspaper, The Observer, even reported that Pte Joyce was the only Irish UN peacekeeper to remain MIA. Almost like the Congo, Pat Mullins seemed to have been forgotten by all except his family, close friends and former comrades.

  For almost thirty years, the search for Pat Mullins remained in this strange kind of limbo – the army file was open but, from the family’s perspective, there appeared to be little or nothing happening. Worse still, the family were confused over the precise details of Pat’s final hours. At first they understood that he had been killed in the initial ambush, but then word began to filter to them from some Congo veterans that Pat’s fate was not quite that simple. The family felt that, at the very least, they deserved more detailed answers about Pat’s death, but most of all they wanted his memory and his sacrifice better honoured.

  Pat’s father, Ned, died on 30 November 1960 – just eight months before Pat flew out to the Congo with the 35th Battalion. The family was grateful that he wasn’t alive to endure the nightmare of not knowing Pat’s fate and the whereabouts of his youngest son’s body. But it was a nightmare that Pat’s mother, Catherine, poignantly had to live with for the last thirty-seven years of her life.

  Catherine died on 10 December 1998. She was eighty-eight years old and had prayed for Pat every day of her life since September 1961. Catherine was a strong woman but her children suspected that she had never really gotten over the disappearance and death of Pat. His brothers and sisters knew the pain she felt over her missing youngest child – and, above all else, they didn’t want to do anything that might add to her suffering. Part of the reason the family didn’t launch a high-profile campaign in Pat’s name in the 1970s and 1980s was concern over the hurt and pain it might cause their mother. As Catherine got older, Pat’s siblings worried about the impact such a campaign might have on her. Pat’s disappearance remained an unhealed wound with Catherine until she died. Her main instruction to her family before her death was that she wanted her youngest son commemorated on her gravestone in the cemetery located directly behind St Joseph’s church in Kilbehenny.

  One month before her death, Catherine got the greatest signal yet that Ireland had not totally forgotten the heroic sacrifice of her eighteen-year-old son. On 8 November 1998 a special ceremony was organised in Collins Barracks in Dublin to honour Ireland’s UN dead. (A few years later the barracks itself fell victim to Ireland’s military cost cutting and was transformed into an annex of the National Museum.) But, that November day, Defence Minister Michael Smith formally presented a total of thirty-six Military Star medals to the relatives of Defence Force personnel killed overseas on UN duties, including the Mullins family. The Military Star – one of the highest awards that can be bestowed by the Defence Forces – aims to recognise personnel killed overseas in the course of their duty. The award ribbon is made up of the Irish Tricolour framed by black-edged purple bands – the traditional colours of requiem. The central depiction on the eight-pointed bronze medal is that of Cú Chulainn, the fabled warrior of Ulster and core figure in Ireland’s classic poem, The Táin. The depiction is that of Cú Chulainn bravely standing his ground against his enemies despite being mortally wounded. The bar on the ribbon carries a single word – ‘Remembrance’. The reverse of the medal carries Pat Mullins’ army number, his name, the date he fell in action and the UN mission he was supporting.

  ‘I think that medal meant an awful lot to my mother,’ Mary Kent said. ‘It was as if they were saying that, despite all the years, what Pat did and the courage he showed had not been forgotten. It was something. We wanted Pat’s body to be found and brought home. But at least this was something.’

  The award meant that Pat’s service record now included three medals – the Military Star, the Congo Medal, which was awarded to all Irish personnel who served in the UN mission, and the UN Peace Medal which, following the 1988 award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the United Nations, was awarded to all personnel who had worn the blue beret. The medals and ribbons were framed and now enjoy a place of honour on the wall of the Boher house where Pat Mullins grew up.

  But medals couldn’t hide the reality that Pat’s body was still missing and unaccounted for in the Congo. Yet there appeared little the government could – or would – do about the matter. The government and Defence Forces faced a political and logistical headache in terms of getting anything done in Africa. Under President Mobutu, the era of UN involvement in the Congo was now ignored, as were all the issues arising from it. For Mobutu, the past held painful and potentially damaging truths – particularly about his involvement in the death of Patrice Lumumba who had emerged as one of the martyrs of African independence. Lumumba’s murder was a political minefield the US, the UN and particularly the Belgians were deeply conscious of.

  As the Congo slid deeper into the mire of corruption, stagnation and anarchy, powerful interests were determined that stability would be preserved at all costs for the vast mining wealth of Katanga. Humanitarian as a search for the missing Irish UN peacekeeper might seem, if it threatened to embarrass the Congolese or the Katangans, it was something the corporations could do without.

  Back in Ireland, the Defence Forces’ position was that the file on Tpr Mullins remained open and active. But, in truth, little of consequence was done. No investigative team was ever sent to Katanga after 1964 to search for clues to his whereabouts, despite the fact that the fighting was long since over in the southern province. What was most agonising about this delay was the fact that age, disease and emigration had inexorably whittled down the number of people potentially in a position to help with information about Tpr Mullins.

  By 2000, a ten-year-old Katangan child who might have witnessed the Irish soldier’s fate or burial back in 1961 was now forty-nine years old. Tragically, in a country wracked by disease, poverty, malnutrition, poor medical services and regular armed revolts, very few people live into their fifties. According to World Bank figures, the average life expectancy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2004 was just 53.7 years. In contrast, the average life expectancy in Ireland in 2004 was 79.4 years.

  It wasn’t until the 1990s that momentum finally began to build to get something tangible done for the Mullins family. The key factor was t
hat Pat’s former comrades and friends began to retire – and, one by one, they suddenly had the time to devote to reviving and reinvigorating a search campaign. Crucially, a lot of his friends were no longer in the army and no longer worried about the potential implications of being seen to ‘rock the boat’ over the handling of the Pat Mullins case.

  Foremost amongst those who helped kick-start the campaign was Art Magennis, who had retired with the rank of commandant. Art had never forgotten the information he had received from Bill Williams in Elisabethville or the scene at the mission cemetery where the remains of Mick Nolan were finally recovered. He felt honour-bound to do his best to reinvigorate the campaign to highlight Pat Mullins’ case and, if possible, persuade the government to send a search team out to Elisabethville – now called Lubumbashi.

  Similarly, John O’Mahony had never forgotten his best friend. He kept all his photos of Pat Mullins and their time together, both in Fitzgerald Camp and the Congo. Some of the only photos now in existence of Pat Mullins in the last weeks of his life survive thanks to John. Over time, Art and John began to correspond over precisely what to do. Other former Congo colleagues gradually joined them and they decided that, to begin with, they would work just to highlight Pat Mullins’ status and the courage he showed in the Congo.

  A major breakthrough came on 10 February 1990 when a new military representative organisation was set up following a meeting in Dublin of ex-soldiers. The Irish United Nations Veterans Association (IUNVA) was set up with the primary role of providing advice and counselling to members and their families who have been affected by their overseas service with the UN. The Association, which is endorsed by the Minister for Defence, is financed by membership fees, voluntary contributions and fundraising. It also organises social, cultural and sporting events for its members. But, crucially, IUNVA took up the cudgel on behalf of the Mullins and Joyce families, particularly through their Fermoy-based Post 25. With their help, the Mullins case began to re-emerge in the headlines.