Ex-officer tells of ‘horrendous’ conditions in tunnel during Noah Donohoe search

A retired police officer has described the “horrendous” conditions in a storm drain tunnel network in which the body of Noah Donohoe was discovered.

Retired inspector Menary, who previously managed the PSNI hazardous environment search (HES) team, told Belfast coroner’s court that anyone entering the tunnel without protective clothing would have been “absolutely frozen”.

The inquest into the death of the schoolboy at Belfast Coroner’s Court, which is being heard with a jury, is now in its fourth week.

Noah, a pupil of St Malachy’s College, was 14 when he was found dead in a storm drain tunnel in north Belfast in June 2020, six days after leaving home on his bike to meet two friends in the Cavehill area of the city.

A post-mortem examination found the cause of death was drowning.

Resuming his evidence on Wednesday, Mr Menary told the jury that his team had resumed his search of a stretch of the storm drain network on Thursday June 25, four days after Noah went missing.

The tunnel could be accessed from a culvert entrance in Northwood Linear Park in north Belfast, close to where Noah had last been seen on the Sunday before.

Mr Menary told the jury that at this stage he was involved in a search operation, not a body recovery operation.

He said at that point there was “no evidence” Noah had gone down into the storm drain.

He said: “We were looking for anything strange or out of the ordinary within the culvert.”

Mr Menary searched in an area underneath Seaview football pitch, the home of Crusaders FC.

Describing the conditions, he said: “It’s freezing cold. My flood suit at the time is sealed, but doesn’t fully seal around the waist, so when I was lying down the water was coming over the top of me and up into the bottom of my jacket.”

Counsel for the coroner Declan Quinn asked what it would have been like for someone to be in the tunnel without protective clothing.

Mr Menary said: “Somebody doing that with no clothes would have been absolutely horrendous and you would have been absolutely frozen.”

Mr Quinn asked about the physical exertion which would have been needed for someone to travel from the entrance to the culvert system at Linear Park to the stretch of tunnel which the retired officer had searched.

Mr Menary said: “The water would have continually come over you and you would have been frozen.

“You begin to get disorientated because of the cold, you begin to slow down and you just continually move on that section underneath the football pitch.”

The retired officer said it was “heartbreaking” to think Noah had been in the tunnel.

He said: “It’s hard and that bit underneath the pitch was fairly horrendous.”