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Concern is mounting for an Irish backpacker who has been missing for over a week.

Police are searching for 26-year-old Sean Walsh, who failed to turn up at the airport for his flight home, on Sunday 10 May.

The biomedical engineer, from Dungarvon, County Waterford, has not been seen since.

Friends of his in Sydney, where he had been living in Randwick while working for a carpet cleaning business, have described how he had seemed distant and unsettled in the days before his disappearance.

Mr Walsh’s two sisters, Mairead and Brid, have since flown to Sydney to help find their brother. The family are also using Facebook and Twitter to try and trace his whereabouts.

“Sean didn’t explain to friends why he was upset,” Mairead Walsh told the Daily Telegraph.

“He wasn’t cross or anything but he wasn’t engaging in conversation,” she said. Mairead went on to describe her brother, who had been travelling for about a year in Japan and New Zealand before arriving in Sydney last November, as a happy-go-lucky guy who was involved with Sydney’s Gaelic football clubs.

He was supposed to be going home for a two-week holiday before returning to Australia to look for engineering work.

Chief inspector David McBeath said: “It’s just a mystery at this point. Either he doesn’t want to be found or, worst case scenario, he may have tried to harm himself.

“There’s nothing to suggest anything suspicious,” he added.
Sean is described as 175cm tall with a thin build, short brown hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion.

If you have any information, visit www.seanwalshmissing.com or call Maroubra Police on 02 9349 9233.