A woman has been arrested in Ireland on suspicion of the murder of an eight-year-old boy who disappeared two years ago.
Gardai investigating the suspected murder of Kyran Durnin said on Tuesday the woman, whose name has not been made public, was being detained at a police station in the east of the country.
The arrest marks a major development in the three-month investigation, which was upgraded to a murder inquiry in October even though Kyran’s body had not been found. Detectives said at the time they strongly suspected he was dead.
Kyran and his mother were only reported missing on 30 August this year. His mother was located in the UK shortly afterwards.
The case has shocked the nation, with the prime minister, Simon Harris, questioning how an eight-year-old child could have disappeared without anyone appearing to notice. It was, he said, an “utterly horrifying” case.
“For any of us as a human being, for any of us parents, to think that a child can effectively disappear and go unnoticed … is utterly heartbreaking and clearly something went extraordinarily wrong here. This child was failed, and was failed badly,” Harris said.
“How was this child failed? How could an eight-year-old boy effectively disappear and not be noticed?” he asked.
Police have said they believed he was last known to have been a pupil at a school in his home town of Dundalk at the end of the 2021-22 academic year, when he was six years old.
Police on Tuesday renewed their appeal to members of the public to come forward if they had any information.
In October the Irish justice minister, Helen McEntee, described the case as “devastating”.
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“We need to know: have there been failures here, where have those failures been taking place, but also who is responsible for them?
“I am absolutely adamant if there were failings here, they need to be addressed and people need to be held accountable.”