‘It’s like 45 years of torture’: searching for the bodies of the Troubles’ victims

Oliver McVeigh at Bragan Bog, County Monaghan, in October last year. A new search is under way there for the remains of his brother Columba who disappeared in 1975, aged 19. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

The British army checkpoints and patrols and watchtowers are gone, but when Geoff Knupfer surveys the fields and bogs of Ireland’s borderlands he sees a landscape still haunted by the Troubles.

The remains of people murdered and clandestinely buried by the IRA lie concealed in the soil, their locations swallowed by time and secrecy.