John Downing: It’s been 104 years and no body ever found – the IRA ‘disappeared’ my grandfather too

My grandfather, Tom Downing, was abducted and murdered by the IRA in Cork city back in the violent days of late November 1920, and his body has never been recovered to this day. His story has lain idle for a century, and was unsurprisingly a family taboo in the uber-nationalist decades which followed, when retrospectively everyone had been “out fighting the Tans”.