A dad is to sue the State after a report into the discovery of his son’s body claimed serious blunders were made by gardai and forensics experts.
Denis Walsh Jnr, 23, was reported missing by his family on March 10, 1996.
However, unknown to his loved ones, who were searching for him for a further 25 years, Denis Jnr’s partial remains were recovered by gardai 28 days after he went missing.
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The remains, which included a partial skull with flesh and hair, torso, arms, and hands, were found on the shoreline at Inis Mor off Galway Bay, on April 7, 1996, but they were not identified until February last year.
Denis Walsh Snr has instructed lawyers to sue the State for what he claims were serious shortfalls in the investigation into the discovery of his son’s remains.
It follows a report produced by a UK police expert that criticised the State’s handling of the case.
It found “the required standards of crime scene management were not met when the corpse was discovered, and forensic potential may have been squandered that could have assisted in the identification of the deceased”.
The report continued: “It is very difficult to understand how gardai failed to link the discovery of the corpse with Mr Walsh [Jnr], because of the timescales and geographical proximity.”
It said it appeared that gardai “did not routinely check the outstanding missing persons for the area”.
Mr Walsh’s parents had been in Galway the day before their son’s remains were found and had handed out flyers at Garda stations.
During an inquest last year into Mr Walsh Jnr’s death Galway West Coroner Dr Ciaran MacLoughlin stated, that in 2007 there was “no [DNA] database and the software was not available to operate a search” of unidentified remains.
Dr MacLoughlin recorded an open verdict and recommended that all human remains found in the future be identified “in a timely fashion”.
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