Ex-officer questioned over urgency of police tunnel search for Noah Donohoe

Ex-officer questioned over urgency of police tunnel search for Noah Donohoe The officer told the inquest he still thinks all the time about Noah being 'naked and afraid' in an underground tunnel 18:34, 18 Feb 2026 A police search for Noah Donohoe in an underground tunnel “neither started nor proceeded with any sense of urgency”, a barrister representing the schoolboy’s mother has told an inquest. Brenda Campbell KC questioned a retired police officer on the pace of the search operation which took place in a storm drain network in the days after the teenager disappeared in 2020. The officer told the inquest he still thinks all the time about Noah being “naked and afraid” in an underground tunnel. Retired inspector Menary, who previously managed the PSNI hazardous environment search (HES) team , said he had never encountered a case before where someone had managed to travel such a distance under the ground in a storm drain tunnel. 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 at St Malachy’s College, was 14 when his naked body was found 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 postmortem examination found the cause of death was drowning. Ms Campbell, who represents Fiona Donohoe in the proceedings, questioned Mr Menary on Wednesday afternoon. The barrister asked the witness whether he had understood in the early part of the search operation that Noah was a “high-risk” missing child. Mr Menary said he had presumed it was a high-risk case because of Noah’s age and the amount of time he had been missing. Ms Campbell said it had always been a possibility that Noah had entered a tunnel through a culvert entrance near to Northwood Linear Park and “the longer the search took, the less likely it is he would survive”. Mr Menary said there had been no evidence that Noah had gone into the culvert when his team had been deployed. Ms Campbell asked the witness if he had been aware that a police theory then was that Noah was still in the vicinity seeking cover. Mr Menary said he did not know that. Mr Menary also said he was not aware at the point his team first arrived at Linear Park on June 23, two days after Noah disappeared, that it had been reported the teenager was naked when last seen. Ms Campbell said: “I’m going to suggest that your search neither started nor proceeded with any sense of urgency. I anticipate you disagree with that?” Mr Menary said: “Correct.” Ms Campbell suggested that the officer should have been “duty-bound” to ask how long Noah would have been safe if he was in the culvert. She said: “Did you ask yourself that question?” Mr Menary said: “I did ask the questions how soon can we get the team up there, how soon was it possible to put all the things in place in order to do a confined space entry.” ‌ Ms Campbell questioned the witness about the first time his HES colleagues had attended Linear Park on June 23. She suggested the officers had been in the park since 11am, but said it was several hours before Mr Menary phoned the Department of Infrastructure seeking maps of the underground tunnels. Ms Campbell said: “One of the questions that you might think Noah’s mother might reasonably ask is where is the urgency?” ‌ Mr Menary said there were only two members of the HES team available to go to the park on the Tuesday. After the maps were received, it was decided that a further search by the team would be deployed on the Wednesday. Ms Campbell said there were still five hours of daylight left on the Tuesday, and asked if further members of the HES were not deployed on that day because of “form filling”. ‌ Mr Menary said: “No, that’s not correct. The team were not available at that time.” Earlier, the ex-officer had told the inquest that he had searched in an area underneath Seaview football pitch, the home of Crusaders FC, later in the week. 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.” The retired officer said it was “heartbreaking” to think Noah had been in the tunnel. ‌ Mr Quinn asked Mr Menary if he now believed his team had carried out the operation in as “professional and as urgent a manner as you could”. Mr Menary said: “I do.” He said the majority of people on the team had children around Noah’s age. ‌ He said: “The longer you work on this job, the more personal it does become. “Eventually, when we heard following Noah’s recovery there was a real sense of sadness that they had found Noah in the system. “I suppose, as the search went on, there was a thought, he’ll never be found here, it’s too far gone, it’s too far down the system.” ‌ Mr Menary said his reaction was a “real sense of sadness” because he knew what Noah had gone through. He said: “We had taken those steps that Noah had taken and there was a real amount of sadness. “There was a sense of relief too that Noah had finally been found and brought home.” ‌ Mr Menary said there was also “frustration” within his team that they had not located Noah. Mr Quinn then asked: “Have you ever experienced in your career a person of any age, particularly a child, entering a culvert system like this, at its start point, naked and managed to travel to such a location downstream?” The witness replied: “Never.” ‌ Asked about the emotional impact on his team, Mr Menary said: “We reflect on all the things we do, and we would be robots if we didn’t. “Being down there and actually taking that route, we had lights, we had everything else. “To think of somebody doing that alone, naked, afraid in the dark, I still think about it today.” Article continues below He added: “I can’t even begin to imagine the hurt, the difficulty, the daily pain that all this would cause, I think about it all the time.” The inquest will resume on Thursday. Want to see more from ? Make us your preferred source on Google to get more breaking news and must-read content straight away