A FACEBOOK POST claiming that the media is covering up a surge in young girls going missing in Ireland has been shared widely — despite media covering all the missing persons mentioned in the post, and most of them having since been found safe. 

“Why is nobody in the mainstream media talking about this?” the post, shared more than 148 times since being posted to Facebook on 25 August reads.

“Young girls are disappearing in Ireland and the silence is deafening.”

The post features seven pictures showing screenshots of headlines and social media posts about missing persons.

“When the story doesn’t fit their narrative, they’d rather bury it than report it. Where’s the outrage, the investigations, the wall-to-wall coverage we see for other issues? The establishment press would rather look the other way. Time to start asking WHY.”

The facts

The post is misleading on a number of points.

Firstly, the mainstream media reported on every single one of the missing person cases featured in the post — in fact, most of the screenshots featured in the post were from media sources such as the Irish Mirror, Dublin Live, and the Sunday World.

The remaining two screenshots were from social media posts by the Missing Persons Helpline. However, these cases had also been reported in publications like the Limerick Leader, the Irish Mirror, and the Leinster Leader.

As well as this, most of the missing persons featured in the post had already been found by the time the post was published online.

Five of the seven missing persons were described as being found “safe and well” by mainstream media or the gardaí. None of these had been missing for more than a month.

However, one of those girls that had been found has since gone missing again.

Two of the girls featured in the post have still not been found, according to garda missing person appeals. Gardaí are still asking for information regarding a 16-year-old girl who went missing from Dublin in April, and a 14-year-old who went missing from Limerick City on August 13.

Patterns

While every missing person case is serious, it is misleading to claim that there is a surge in young girls going missing and that the media is ignoring it.

“There is no perceptible increase in missing teens, but there is a noticeable increase in Media and other sources who publish the Garda alerts thereby increasing public perception,” Dermot Browne of National Missing Persons Helpline Ireland told The Journal.

Garda statistics show there had been 5,522 missing person reports in total (including all ages and genders) up until the end of June, compared with 11,092 for all of 2024, indicating a slight decrease. 

However, the number of individuals that are reported missing is usually about a half to a third the total number of reports, indicating that many of the same people go missing multiple times.

“The majority of published alerts relate to those in the 14-17 age group, and it is within this group that we see the most repeat cases,” Browne told The Journal. 

The overwhelming majority of missing persons have since been found, according to Garda statistics. A small minority were found deceased, while an even smaller number remain missing, according to figures analysing Garda missing persons media alerts compiled by the National Missing Persons Helpline.

A bad understanding of missing person stats has led to previous panics. In America the QAnon conspiracy theory, which asserted that a sinister cabal was sacrificing children in rituals, was bolstered by the claim that 365,348 children had gone missing in 2020 and the media wasn’t talking about it.

While that figure was correct number of missing person reports for children, it was not the case as claims spread by Qanon adherents implied that 1 in 200 American children was disappearing each year.

Instead, that figure reflects custody battles and children running away from home. Most of these cases are resolved quickly, but can recur with the same children being reported missing multiple times a year.

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