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A heartbroken sister has told of the extreme lengths she has gone to find her brother who hasn’t been seen in almost a quarter of a century.
Jean Mahon saw her brother Richard Doolan for the last time in Croy, Glasgow on March 24, 2001.
Now living in Dublin, she has never given up hope he could still be alive.
Richard was reported missing to authorities when his mother had a gut feeling that something was wrong.
When she visited his apartment to find his wallet, driving licence and his personal belongings still there, the family worries only grew.
Despite extensive searches, they are none the wiser on what happened to him.
Speaking on Venetia Quick’s The Grief Pod, Jean said she doesn’t feel she can grieve for her brother because there is no body and no resting place.
She said: “When someone asks and you say my brother is a missing person, he’s missing for 24 years, the first reaction from then is to say, ‘I’m so sorry’.
“But I actually don’t feel as if I have the right to grieve because I haven’t lost him.
“You could ask me today and I would be pretty confident that Richard has passed.
“But yesterday Richard moved to London and he has a wife and a couple of kids and he’s happy there.
“And that’s the difference with this type of loss because you don’t know. We don’t have any way to grieve, there’s nowhere for us to go.”
The loving sister has gone to great lengths over the years to try and get questions answered about what happened to Richard.
Not long after he went missing she applied for a role within the government’s social protection department, hoping she could get access to his files.
Before he went missing Richard was claiming benefits, so she wanted to see if he was still collecting them.
Jean explained: “After six months I got a promotion to a separate building where I had access to Richard’s files.”
Despite knowing she could be fired for accessing those records, Jean was determined to get some answers.
She continued: “He hadn’t got any more benefits.
“They stopped when he became a missing person.
“In a sense, I found what I needed to know but I didn’t find what I was looking for. I was hoping maybe he had moved away and claimed somewhere else and there would be a forwarding address.”
Jean explained that the past 24 years have been “an endless cycle of grief” with “a bit of hope thrown in now and again”.
Despite living in Ireland, she still looks for him everywhere she goes.
She said: “It happens every day. We went to Croke Park there, 83,000 people and 90% of the time you are looking at people. The way they walk, the way they turn their head, their height, their stature, just for the slightest chance maybe you could see him.
“I have jumped and thought, ‘Omg that’s Richard’ then it’s not, and they are the ones that hurt the most.”
Jean praised the Irish Mirror’s Missing Persons Campaign, which highlighted some of over 800 people who are missing in this country.
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