FOR more than a year, Niall Clarke was missing, his worried family unsure about where he was, and full of theories about his fate. His father Michael was sure he was dead; his mother Mary feared he was locked up in some dirty, decrepit jail. "It was a year of torture for us, " Michael Clarke says. "It was totally out of character for him to lose contact with us."

Then Niall's sister Michelle had a brainwave. She keyed his name into the Google website in the hope that it would throw up some evidence of her brother's whereabouts. When that failed, she tried again. And again and again, until one day, late last year, she found what she was looking for: Niall Clarke had been arrested in the United States for armed robbery of a bank. On 4 October last, in Bangor, Maine, he had pointed a gun at bank staff and demanded that they fill a bag with cash.

It was a botched robbery, clearly carried out by somebody with no experience of crime. But the 26year-old Clare man now faces up to 25 years in prison on the armed robbery charge and a mandatory minimum consecutive sentence of seven years for brandishing a weapon. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he will most likely spend close to 10 years in prison.

Clarke's distraught parents, Mary and Michael, spoke to the Sunday Tribune in their home on the outskirts of Kilrush, Co Clare, this weekend after returning to Ireland from the US, where they visited their son in prison. It is the first time they have spoken to an Irish newspaper after weeks of inaccurate and sensational coverage of his ordeal.

"On our last visit with him he gave us a big hug and that meant so much to us, " Mary Clarke recalls. "That is so important to a mother."

A few years ago, the Clarke family could never have imagined that they would find themselves visiting their son in a US prison. Niall was an academic genius, a sports fan, had a nice girlfriend and, as the owner of his own software company, he had the world at his feet.

When he was growing up his mother and father recall, other parents used to say to their children, "Why can't you be more like Niall Clarke?" And despite recent events, the Clarkes are still held in high regard in Kilrush. Their house is now a sea of mass cards and bouquets of flowers from well-wishers.

They have been overwhelmed by the level of support they have received from people in Clare and in Maine, where concerned parents, touched by the story they read in their newspapers, have offered to visit Niall.

"Everybody knew him as a loving, charming and helpful young fellow, " Michael Clarke, who works at the ESB plant in Moneypoint, says. "Whether it be helping kids with their physics or maths or his involvement in rugby, cycling and athletics, he was well-respected. Socially, he was a fine young man and everybody adored him because he had a big welcome smile, a hearty laugh and he always spoke first when he met people. What has happened to Niall is completely out of character."

Niall Clarke was very passionate about computers when he was growing up in Clare in the 1990s. It was obvious that he could carve out a successful career in this area. "He was not satisfied with knowing how a computer worked, " says Michael Clarke. "He would have to rip it apart to see what it looked like. When he was at school he used to teach the teachers about computers. He was the same at physics and maths and he was academically a genius."

Having been chosen to participate in the Maths Olympiad and winning a Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2002, Niall seemed to be on his way to a successful career when he set up his own computer software company after graduating from Trinity College Dublin.

"Even though he was so academic, he was not a nerd and he was interested in sport, " his father recalls. "He had everything you could ask for in a son. He never gave us any trouble from the time he went to playschool to the time he left college. Nobody had a bad word to say about him."

After finishing college, Niall's parents noticed a major change in their son's character. "He was going out with a lovely girl and he broke it off with her, " his father says. "Niall and I were very close and he always came to me for advice, but he started to turn against me as well. We knew at that stage that he had a serious psychiatric problem as he was pushing everybody that was closest to him in life away."

The Clarkes noticed that their son was very uneasy and was displaying symptoms of anxiety at this time. He sought help from an acupuncturist and he began reading books on yoga, meditation and the power of alternative healing. At this point he decided to go to India for a break to see if he could get any more help.

"He left for India in December 2002 and we got phone calls from him saying that he was distressed, " Mary Clarke, who runs an award-winning B&B in Kilrush, says. "We were very concerned and encouraged him to come home.

When he eventually came home in November 2003, he was extremely thin, mentally disturbed and very distressed."

Niall's father sought help from a local psychiatric day care centre. Staff there asked that he would voluntarily go and speak to them. He refused.

"It got to the stage where we asked them to come out and see him at the house, " says Michael. "I put all the paperwork in order to get Niall admitted to a local psychiatric hospital. They assessed him here in the house and they advised him to go to the mental hospital, but he point-blank refused."

Niall's mother tried to have her son admitted to the hospital again, but she kept meeting brick walls. "I feel that the health system has failed us completely, " she says. "As Niall was not prepared to go in voluntarily, there was nowhere for us to turn." She met with the Aware organisation in Dublin and contacted private psychiatrists, only to find they all had waiting lists of up to four or five weeks. "So even if Niall was half agreeable to go and see a psychiatrist, we would have needed an appointment straight away. When somebody is mentally unwell, it is hard to tell them to wait for four or five weeks as they will have changed their mind in one or two days."

At one point, the Clarkes felt that they had convinced their son to get private psychiatric help. "We rang to book an appointment only to find out about the waiting lists, and by that stage Niall refused to go, " Mary Clarke says. "We feel that the