Mick Rooney | Journalist & Broadcaster

Brian Kinsella went missing from his family home in Gracedieu Heights in Waterford, Ireland on the 17th November 2021. He told his parents that he was heading to a phone shop to have his new device looked at after having problems with it. This was just after 9 am. He was due in work at 12 pm at Musgrave’s Cash & Carry where he worked for his daily shift. He never turned up for work and soon it was established that he also never visited the phone shop in Waterford. He was last seen on CCTV near Grattan Quay in the town at 10.10am that morning. No trace of him or the reasons behind his disappearance were ever discovered. He was reported missing on the day of his disappearance at 7 pm. An extensive local, land and sea search began soon afterwards lasting many weeks and months right into February 2022. His case soon captured local and national media attention in Ireland due to the efforts of his family and friends. To this day, in 2024, substantive leads have never emerged. Subsequ

At the time of her disappearance Fiona Sinnott was living in the rural village of Ballyhitt, Broadway, County Wexford, Ireland, some 120 kilometres south of Dublin City. Fiona was a young single mother, and her daughter Emma was eleven months old at the time of her mother’s disappearance. 19 year old Fiona Sinnott spent the night of Sunday February the 8th 1998 socialising with a group a friends in Butler’s Pub in Broadway Co. Wexford not far from her rented home. Fiona’s friends described Fiona as being happy that night, and in good spirits. However, her friends would later tell Gardai that Fiona was also complaining of pain in one of her arms. Fiona had been the victim of domestic violence in the past and the report of pain in her arm raised the suspicions of Gardai when examining the case. Also in Butler’s Pub that Sunday night was Fiona’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her child, he did not join Fiona and her friends and spent the night drinking at the bar alone. At roughly midnigh

Mary Boyle (born 14 June 1970) was a six-year-old Irish girl who disappeared on the County Donegal-County Fermanagh border on 18th March 1977. To date, her disappearance is the longest missing child case in the Republic of Ireland. The investigation into her disappearance has been beset by allegations of political intervention and police incompetence. While arrests were made over many years, nobody has ever been charged in connection with her disappearance. Mary Boyle was last seen at 3:30 pm on 18 March 1977 near her grandparents' rural farm in Cashelard, near Ballyshannon, County Donegal. The family, including Mary's mother Ann, father Charlie, older brother Paddy, and twin sister Ann, had gone to Mary's maternal grandparents' house on St Patrick's Day from their home in Kincasslagh in The Rosses, further up the coast. They stayed at the grandparents home overnight into the day of her disappearance. In total, there were eleven people at the household gathering, si

Written in 1990, published as a limited edition micro-novel, ARCADIA is a complex prose-poem and took its inspiration from the opening of the Book of Genesis. Featuring a mysterious female protagonist, we enter and exit worlds of the past and future. Across three decades, and on two unsuccessful occasions, the micro-novel, almost, but never quite made it to a scripted and experimental short film. Sometimes, a piece of work never quite reaches realisation until the right time comes along. But that is the journey of life itself. Published again as part of my prose collection Filigree & Shadow in 2016, Arcadia now has a visual hand to hold it. And sometimes, it's best to just do it yourself with modern technology. ARCADIA lives again, as it always will long after I'm gone from this world to the next.  

Sophie Toscan du Plantier, a 39-year-old French woman, was killed outside her holiday home at Toormore, Goleen, County Cork, Ireland, on the night of 23rd December 1996. Her badly beaten body, still dressed in white nightwear and outdoor boots, was discovered by a neighbour the following morning close to an entrance gate at the bottom of her holiday home driveway. British journalist Ian Bailey, who lived several kilometres from Toscan du Plantier's home in Ireland, was a suspect arrested twice by the Garda Síochána, yet no charges were laid as the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) found there was insufficient evidence to proceed to trial. Bailey lost a libel case against six newspapers in 2003. He also lost a wrongful arrest case against the Gardaí, Minister for Justice, and Attorney General in 2015. In 2019, Bailey was convicted of murder by the Cour d'Assises in Paris, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was tried in absentia in France after winning a legal battle aga