Where are the graves of our loved ones, Gerry?

Pressure is mounting on the former leadership of the Provisional IRA to come clean about Northern Ireland's so-called 'Disappeared' following yesterday's discovery of the partial remains of a Belfast youth who vanished almost 30 years ago.

Danny McIlhone was among 15 Catholics to have been executed by the Provisionals during the Troubles and buried in secret graves. In most cases, they were suspected of being informers or British spies, though McIlhone was accused of stealing weapons from an IRA cache.

Information gathered by the official commission charged with locating the victims' last resting places led investigators to a remote hillside some 50 miles south of Dublin where McIlhone's remains were found.

The grisly discovery follows furious exchanges in the Northern Ireland Assembly last week during a debate on the continuing search for the disappeared, an issue that has contributed significantly to a four-month political deadlock.

The Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was accused to his face of having set up and directed the IRA hit teams that hunted down alleged traitors. "Is it not time for him to show some remorse for those crimes (and) the evil inflicted on so many families?" asked one senior Unionist politician. The allegations were vehemently denied by Adams, who paid tribute to the families of the missing - some of whom were in the public gallery - for their dignity in the face of "a grievous injustice".

The day before the debate, relatives of the disappeared held an All Souls' Day service outside the Assembly building. Among them was Anna McShane, whose father, Charlie Armstrong, was abducted while on his way to Mass in 1981.

She told the BBC that all her family wanted was to be able to give him a Christian burial and finally achieve closure after so long. "There are people we know and meet every day that know something," McShane added, "and it's those people that we're actually begging now to come forward - we're not looking for any kind of retaliation."

Following the establishment of the commission for the disappeared in 1999, which formed part of the Good Friday peace agreement, the Provisionals passed on information about the location of six graves that contained eight bodies. However, only four sets of remains have so far been recovered, and in the case of Jean McConville (pictured below), the discovery was accidental.

The circumstances of McConville's murder in 1972 are particularly harrowing: a widow who had converted to Catholicism, the mother of 10 children, she was accused of spying for the British. In fact, her only 'crime' was to have comforted a young British soldier who had been shot and lay dying outside her house.

Acting on the basis of information from the IRA, intensive searches were undertaken around a beach in the Irish Republic, but it was not until 2003 that someone walking on another beach not far away chanced upon McConville's remains.

The families of those who are still missing are understandably concerned by the possibility that the search process may be wound up by the end of next year. Kieran Megraw's brother Brendan was kidnapped from his home in West Belfast in 1978 and so far, no indication about where he was buried has emerged.

"The forensic searching team... is only going to be in place for another 12 months... so now is the time to get information about Brendan." ·