Maddie’s Irish Family Speaks Out

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Maddie’s Irish Family Speaks Out

September 24, 2007

By Paddy Clancy

MISSING British toddler Madeleine McCann’s Donegal-born grandmother, Eileen McCann, has stoutly defended the child’s parents after they were named as formal suspects in the disappearance.

Eileen McCann said her son Gerry and his wife Kate would never do anything to harm their child. She claimed there was no substantial evidence linking the couple to the disappearance; that the Portuguese police were “just clutching at straws.”

Eileen added in an interview with Donegal’s Highland Radio that she was convinced whoever took three-year-old Madeleine from the family’s holiday apartment in Portugal had drugged her beforehand.

“If she was taken by somebody she did not know when she was sleeping she would have screamed the place down. I really believe they gave her a drug. There is no way they carried her out of there without her wakening,” Eileen said.

Congregations in churches throughout Donegal prayed last weekend for the McCann family after Portuguese police revealed they were suspects.

Portuguese investigators are reported to believe Maddie may have been accidentally killed by her mother and that in a desperate cover-up bid, Gerry helped bury the body at sea.

Friends and relatives in Donegal were stunned when the theory was reported, but quickly rallied to support of the stricken family when some legal experts warned that the evidence against them was almost non-existent.

Leading Irish barrister Anthony McDermott said the Portuguese police had nothing that could secure a conviction, based on the evidence already leaked by them. The evidence includes claims that police dogs had sniffed out the scent of death in the holiday apartment and in a car hired by the McCann’s 25 days after the disappearance.

“It’s a non-existent case, unless there’s something else,” McDermott said.

Little Madeleine disappeared in Portugal’s popular Algarve tourist province in May, just weeks after she holidayed with her family in Donegal at Easter. They spent more than a week in the Rosses area, staying mostly in a boarding house in Dungloe.

Madeleine and two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie were with their parents and their great-uncle Hughie, as well as their grandmother Eileen, also known as Ellen, who was born in the area.

Eileen was a member of a Ferry family with links to the villages of Crolly and Burtonport. In the mid-1960s she married Hughie’s brother Johnny McCann from St. Johnston in east Donegal and they emigrated to Scotland.

The Easter holiday was one of many that family members used to take in Donegal almost every year, but rarely did so many of them travel together to Ireland before.

On their way back to Belfast Airport they stopped at a pub in St. Johnston which Hughie and Johnny owned before they emigrated.

Current owner Joe Peoples said when Maddie disappeared, “They always made a point of calling in for a couple of drinks and a chat.

“The little girl, Maddie, was running around in the bar, playing away and really enjoying herself. She’s such a beautiful child, a wee dote.

“I’m praying for the phone call that will tell me she has been found and that she is okay.”

Peoples said Maddie’s dad Gerry is proud of his Donegal roots. “They keep very much in touch. They came to St. Johnston almost every year –- the years they missed were few and far between.

“This year they just decided they would like to spend a little more time around the Rosses so they opted to stay in Dungloe.”

Maddie’s parents, both physicians, have returned from Portugal to their home in England where, according to the Daily Mail, lawyers acting for them are going back through Portuguese newspapers to look for evidence of “black propaganda” planted by police.

They hope to be able to prove that Portuguese detectives have been leaking negative stories about the McCanns in a bid to besmirch them.

The McCanns also this week brought in former British Foreign Office official Clarence Mitchell to act as the family spokesman.

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