“It’s hardened me. I don’t care about anything anymore.”

The last time Frances Currie seen her son Matthew McCallan, he was heading for a night out at The Jamboree – an annual country music event attended by youngsters and adults from across the county.

Along with many of his friends, Matthew had travelled to Fintona from his native Dungannon to be there. However, when Matthew’s lift home left without him, the 15-year-old found himself walking the country roads in the pitch black and freezing cold – during which time his mother says she knows he would have been thinking of her.

“He texted me to say that he would be home. When he didn’t arrive, I knew something really bad had happened. I could feel it in my guts,” said Frances.

Frances reported her missing son to the police at 3:30am on December 4, before racing to Fintona with her niece, where the two spent a while driving around the back roads, calling Matthew’s name in the darkness.

“Then we drove home in the hope that he would be there when we got back. But he wasn’t,” she said.

The next day, hundreds of people joined the search, with friends, family, local people and good Samaritans all coming together to help find the missing teenager. Despite this, when Matthew was eventually located by a local woman at 11:45pm on December 5, he was lifeless. An initial postmortem suggested he had died of hypothermia.

“There was so much wrong with the way the police handled the whole thing,” said Frances, who remains as furious with the PSNI today as she was in the immediate months after Matthew’s death.

“On the Monday morning, I got a call from a high-ranking police officer who told me he was ‘all over it’. At that point Matthew had already been outside all night on his own, walking around the roads, slowly freezing to death,” said Frances.

The grieving mother believes that a more urgent police response could have saved her son.

“Search And Rescue Dog Association (SARDA) told me that they were ready to dispatch the dogs early on, but the police never gave them the go-ahead. Can you imagine that? They were the best chance of finding Matthew before he died and the cops didn’t even bother to tell them to join in the search. Half of Tyrone were out looking for him, but why didn’t the police ask for the help of a charity who spend thousands of pounds every year specially-train-ing dogs for these exact circumstances?

“It’s a complete joke. If they had told SARDA to deploy the dogs, I think Matthew could have been found long before he wandered up a field and into a frosty ditch.”

Frances said she is angry at a lot of people, but she cannot say who and why at this stage.

But she did explain how Matthew’s death and the murky circumstances around it have butchered aspects of her better nature.

“It’s hardened me. I don’t care about anything anymore. I used to be shy; now I’d say anything to anyone. My family think I’m scary because of that. But that’s how it’s affected me. My thoughts aren’t the same, I lack empathy and I’ve no patience for people anymore. I have to look after my mother who has dementia and I have to try so hard to be the daughter I used to be,” said Frances.

Losing Matthew has caused Frances to remove herself from the world. She admits that she has become paranoid of what people think of her, and now finds it hard to relate to other mothers.

“I can’t go to the hairdressers anymore, for example. I can’t sit and listen to other people talking about their children going to formals, getting their driving test or having a child because I know Matthew can never do any of that now.

“It’s terrible. Every time you hear somebody else’s good news, instead of being happy for them, all you can do is despair over what Matthew
will never have the chance to do,” said Frances.

When she recalls her son as he was in the months before his death, Frances remembers a young man beginning to ‘come out of himself’.

“He had been really shy when he was wee, but you could see him coming into himself as he got older. He was full of craic and banter.

“A few days before going to Fintona, I asked him if he was going to get himself a woman, and he looked at me and goes, ‘I’m gonna kiss every girl in the place’,” Frances said with a big laugh.

When I asked Frances if she thought she’d see Matthew again, she cried.

“Oh, totally, yes. There is no doubt about that. That’s all I have. I have to hold onto that. People say, ‘Aww, you have another 30 or 40 years in you, and I think, ‘I hope I don’t’.”

But, while Frances’s life has been changed unalterably by Matthew’s death, her family still sustain her, providing her with strength and a reason to go on.

“I have a great family. I went on holidays with my sisters there, and it was great. We done nothing but laugh.

“And I love all my wee nieces and nephews – I’m like a granny to the wee ones.

“But, no matter what I’m doing, no matter where I go, the grief still hangs over me like a cloak. It’s always there and it always will be.”

Responding to questions raised by our conversation with Frances, the PSNI said, “Our thoughts remain with Matthew’s devastated family, however as there is an ongoing inquest, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.”