The mother of missing Amy Fitzpatrick has said the police never treated her or her partner Dave Mahon as suspects in her disappearance.

Amy was just 15 years old when she disappeared on the Costa del Sol in Spain on New Year’s Day in 2008.

The teenager from Coolock in Dublin was living there with her mother Audrey and her stepfather Dave Mahon.

She was last seen leaving a friend’s house where she had been babysitting. She has never been seen or heard from since.

Missing Irish girl Amy Fitzpatrick

On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, Dave Mahon said he never felt like he was under suspicion in the days after Amy first went missing.

“That was the last thing on my mind,” he said. “My job was to find Amy at all costs.

“We didn't know what day of the week it was; it started out with hours missing, days missing, weeks and months.

“Now here we are almost 16 years.”

“The worse the thing that happened, the better it is for the tabloids.”

Dave Mahon and Audrey Fitzpatrick joined Pat Kenny to discuss the disappearance of Audrey’s daughter Amy. pic.twitter.com/TRQDJLO4l3

— NewstalkFM (@NewstalkFM) December 14, 2023

Amy’s mother Audrey said both she and Dave could easily prove where they were on the night Amy disappeared.

“When we did interviews with the Guardia Civil, we were basically witnesses,” she said. “We were never suspects – never ever.

“We told them everything we did that night; everybody knew where we were that night, we had so many people.”

Dean Fitzpatrick

Audrey suffered further tragedy four and a half years later after her son Dean Fitzpatrick died from stab wounds suffered during an altercation with Dave.

Dave was later convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in prison – serving five years and three months before his release in 2021.

Dave Mahon. 14/12/2023. Image: Newstalk.

The pair remain together despite Dave’s involvement in Dean’s death and Audrey explained to Pat what it is that keeps them together.

“The way it is, we're together 22 years,” she said.

“We've been through everything - especially with Amy - and both of us have been hanging on to each other for Amy for so long.

“Dean had a lot of problems before Amy disappeared. There were psychological problems and he suffered from that and then he started taking drugs from an early age.

“I don't like to talk ill of him and I'm not trying to make an explanation for what happened that night with Dean – but that wasn't the first time Dean pulled a knife, that wasn't the first time Dean produced a gun.

“He was on a downward track for a long time. He was such a softy but when the drugs took over, as many people know, there's nothing you can do and then it just turns.”

"Devastated"

She said she was “devastated” when she found out how Dean died but she was not surprised.

“People might find this hard to believe but I could understand it because I had seen it before where Dean took a knife out and Dave had to take the knife off him before,” she said.

“He never did anything to me, but he always had this rage in him and I'm not blaming him – it’s not his fault.”

Mental health

Audrey said she has struggled with her mental health ever since Amy disappeared – but she believes she is still alive for a reason.

“I turned to alcohol, suicide, nervous breakdowns, the whole lot,” she said. “Been there, done that.

“Not being a Holy Joe or anything like that but God, for some reason, wants me to stay alive and I have to believe it's because I have to find Amy.

“Because for some reason, even though I want to, I don't want to walk this life, but I'm still doing it.”

Amy

The pair said they remain hopeful that by continuing to talk about Amy, they will convince somebody who knows something about her whereabouts to speak up.

“Hopefully it'll be a dig at somebody,” said Audrey. “It'll be a nudge at somebody's conscience that somebody might speak up that remembers something or think, ‘Oh God, yeah, I knew him back in the day’ – because it is back in the day, it’s nearly 16 years now.

“So hopefully and that's why she's still very much in people's mind – because we keep pushing it.”