THE funeral of a 23-year-old man will go ahead next week - a quarter of a century after he went missing.
Denis Walsh from Caherdavin, Limerick was last seen in the town on March 9 1996.
His partial remains were found a month later in April 1996 washed up on the shoreline at Inis Mór, on the Aran islands, but were not positively identified until February this year when his family was informed.
Gardaí in Galway were unaware their colleagues in Limerick had begun a missing persons investigation and his family were not notified of the discovery of the unidentified remains.
Mr Walsh’s remains were held in storage at Galway University Hospital until they were laid to rest in a communal grave at Bohermore Cemetery outside Galway City in 2014.
Attempted identification tests in 2008, 2011 and 2017 came back negative, but the family was told in February that advances in DNA profiling had allowed them to be identified as Denis Walsh Jnr.
According to RTÉ, his father Denis Walsh Snr said the body of his son will be exhumed from the Galway grave on Friday, with the funeral taking place the following day at Caherdavin Church.
The family has been "engaging with both Galway County Council and the Department of the Environment about the exhumation process".
He said the news will give them a "certain amount of closure" but that "many questions still remain" about their son's disappearance.
