A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  Revelations of what had been done by holy men who crusaded in support of equal human rights for the unknown fertilised egg were followed by a ghastly confirmation of where such a fetish would lead. The legalisation of abortion, in severely restricted circumstances, was introduced in 1992 after the X case erupted. A fourteen-year-old girl, raped and impregnated by an acquaintance, was brought to England by her parents to secure an abortion. The parents asked Irish police if DNA from the aborted foetus might be used to secure a conviction against the rapist. The state moved instantly to obtain a court order, which demanded that the parents return to Ireland, with the pregnant child, or face charges and possible imprisonment if they procured an abortion for her outside the jurisdiction. Frightened, they brought their pregnant suicidal daughter home to face her doom.

  In face of absolute citizen outrage against internment of the child in Ireland, the Supreme Court convened and found that abortion could be allowed when the life of the mother is threatened by suicide.

  Threats to a mother’s health, as opposed to her life, are still not considered grounds for abortion. This cruelty to pregnant women obtains even where it is medically certain that a diseased foetus will not live seconds beyond birth.

  In the wake of the X case and in exchange for a multi-million injection of funds from the EU, the people voted to allow freedom of travel abroad for an abortion, and freedom of information about abortion at home. That EU funding is generally acknowledged to have given birth to the Celtic Tiger era. The fate of eggs,which are fertilised in Ireland and then exported troubles the Irish not at all. As ever, uncomfortable problems are exported to England and a blind Irish eye is turned to them. The men of medicine disgraced themselves again in the course of yet another referendum to refine and impose further limitations on the original amendment on fertilised eggs. The three masters of Dublin’s maternity hospitals gave a press conference to announce their intention to throw their weight behind it. Under questioning from a now less subservient media, they admitted that their real preference was that termination should be allowed in cases where a damaged foetus would not long survive birth. The proposed amendment failed. The Dáil has yet to act to bring legislation into line with the expressed national vote that abortion be permitted in limited circumstances.

  The situation of Irishwomen is not, however, bleak. Where contraception is concerned, the change is startling. Where once any reference to contraceptive practice was banned, television now carries happily and casually brazen narrative ads from the state-funded Crisis Pregnancy Agency. For instance, a young woman is seen going upstairs and into the bedroom with a young man. Her mother calls the daughter. ‘Have you taken your pill?’

  In another ad, a heterosexual couple are kissing heavily in a fish-and-chip shop. The waitress, delivering their order, asks, ‘Would yeez like a condom with that?’ Condoms are displayed for sale in supermarkets, pubs and pharmacies, in varied flavours and sizes and strengths.

  Fine Gael minister Nuala Fennell abolished the bastardisation of children in the aftermath of the Kerry babies case, and homosexuality was decriminalised by Fianna Fáil minister Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. Senator Mary Robinson, political adviser to the IWLM, was elected president of Ireland in 1992 and served two successive terms, as did her successor Mary McAleese. Though women otherwise failed to make a breakthrough in parliamentary representation, and are fewer in number now than they were before the Kerry babies case, Irishwomen have broken new ground in formerly barren places. Married or single, they now make up nearly half the workforce. The Magdalene houses are closed, and orphan-placement agencies at an effective end. Crèches for the children of working parents flourish, in a society where double-income families are now the norm. The birth rate has shrunk to less than three children per family, and advances have been made with regard to equal pay and equal opportunity, which is now a trade union mantra.

  As against that, marital breakdown has increased and divorce is common. Divorce is not a sign of success in human relations, but it does herald an adult willingness to deal honestly and openly and legally with human failure. Abortion rates are high, albeit conducted elsewhere. Again, the rates do not signal success but a mature acceptance that conception and birth does not always guarantee a happy or desired outcome. The fact that contraceptive practice is not yet the norm among sexually active teenagers signals that sex education still leaves much to be desired.

  Women now do two jobs – working outside the home by day, and rearing a family by night, albeit men do a little more housework than they used to, and can be seen interacting with their children.

  The recent calamitous collapse of the Celtic Tiger has seen the government attempt to push women back to the kitchen sink. Besides losing jobs, women have suffered the double cut of reduction in the family allowances which helped them pay for the childcare that allowed them to take up paid work. The funding of women’s groups around the country has been savagely reduced and the worst cut of all was applied to the Employment Equality Agency, a frontline defender of the rights of women workers. Its budget was halved, an action which rendered it virtually toothless and forced the head of the agency to resign in protest.

  However, in sum, Irish people are in a much better state than they were at the time of the Kerry babies case, if one takes sexual health as the norm against which we are to measure ourselves – and it seems an eminently reasonable measurement. To meet, mate and make a nest, with or without babies, is precious – there are many forms of living together, in community, and these forms do not always include a partner in the home, or sexual congress. Friendship is precious. Joanne Hayes and her family were sustained in their ordeal by the friendship of neighbours and, especially, women friends.

  The writings of Annie Proulx are illuminating about the nature of love and sexuality. In one of her short stories, ‘Them old cowboy songs’, she writes of a damaged cowboy. He cried when his woman gave him little love bites. He cried because nobody had ever loved him like that. ‘I ain’t never been. Loved. I just can’t hardly stand it’ – and he began to blubber ‘feel like I been shot’, pulling her into his arms . . .

  Before the Kerry babies, we were all, in one way or another, damaged cowboys – taking unloving bites out of each other, usually in the name of self-proclaimed holy men, who effectively abolished God and imposed their wretched man- made rules upon our behaviour, aided and abetted by the men of law and medicine and the Dáil. Virginia Woolf had it right when she wrote ‘There it is, then, before our eyes, the procession of the sons of educated men, ascending those pulpits, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, preaching, teaching, administering justice, practising medicine, making money.’

  And inflicting damage untold on we who are cowboys.

  Those days of barbarism are effectively over, though much remains to be done. A single startling example will suffice. It would be considered barbaric nowadays for a couple, heterosexual or gay, to walk down a wedding aisle as virgins; to commit themselves legally to a lifelong relationship, civil or religious, without first living together; to delude themselves that a certificate of marriage means certainty.

  It is very much the norm nowadays, before making such a commitment, to first live together, and then make a baby. The old order of marriage, home and baby has been completely reversed to home, baby and commitment.

  The nightmare that was an Irish honeymoon has vanished. It used to be that a couple brought a towel on honeymoon to absorb the blood that would allegedly flow after the woman had been penetrated by a battering ram known as the penis. Today, most sexually active people happily and enthusiastically engage in sexual congress, equipped with contraception. Horrific exceptions apart – and they are many – the day of the damaged cowboy is done, as is the day of the damaging cleric, doctor, lawyer and elected politician.

  We are not fully healthy yet, but we are getting there and it is wonderful.

  1. The Cahirciveen Baby

  The tombstones in the graveyard of Cah
irciveen, County Kerry, seldom record when a person was born. They boast, rather, of the longevity achieved by those now dead: ‘Margaret O’Sullivan, aged 95’, says one; John Keating was ninety when he finally passed on. The cemetery bears proud testimony to one advantage of existence in a small quiet town on the western Atlantic seaboard, in Ireland’s most scenic county – people live a long time. ‘There are two kingdoms, the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Kerry’ goes the local saying.

  Cornelius O’Sullivan, whose body was brought back from New York in 1982, died in his prime, you might say, worn out by the rigours of life in a big city. He was only seventy-seven. Had he remained on Valentia, the island in the bay overlooked by the cemetery, he might have lived until he was ninety-six, like E.J. Ring, whose tombstone gives the recipe for a vigorous, fulfilled life in the twentieth century: ‘A GAA [Gaelic Athletic Association] man all his life, a fenian forever.’

  The tombstones of these women and men, aged ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety, eighty-four, eighty-one, eighty, eighty-nine, eighty-four, range like affronted sentinels around an anonymous grave marked by a plastic mock-marble cross, on which a local undertaker has spelt out a message in printer’s transfer lettering: ‘In loving memory of me, the Kerry Baby.’

  The words are gently reproachful. The ‘me’ demands a response. Who am I? Where did I come from? I belong to Kerry. I was the Kerry baby. All that is known about this boy-child is that he was born and died within the space of forty-eight hours leading up to 8.30 pm on Saturday 14 April 1984. After birth, his umbilical cord was cut flush with his belly, he was washed, his neck was broken and he was stabbed twenty-eight times in the neck and chest.

  He was found dead, face down, wedged in the rocks on the White Strand beach, three miles from Cahirciveen. A local farmer found him. Jack Griffin had jogged along the small, narrow, sandy crescent and, just before he turned up on to the grassy field that grew right down to the shore’s edge to check on his cows, he spotted the infant. He thought it was a doll. On his way back across the beach he looked again and found the naked baby. It was not the first time that human or animal remains had been found on the sand. The large plastic fertiliser bags that litter the shore testify to the farming of the fields that surround it. For instance, just before lawyers made their final submissions on what came to be known as the Kerry babies case, an evening stroll on White Strand showed four such bags, torn and holed and filled with sand, and the half-covered corpse of a dog.

  The bags and the dog might have come from the fields or been washed up by the sea. A woman who regularly used the beach, as do all the people of Cahirciveen in summer, once found a frogman’s flipper there, with sock attached. She brought it home for the amusement of her children. When they had washed out the seaweed that clogged it they found bones inside. The guards (police) traced the flipper and sock to a man on Valentia Island, which stops up the mouth of the bay, who had hired out the diving suit seven years before. The diver had subsequently been lost, presumed drowned, off Beginish Island, which lies between Valentia and White Strand.

  Now, seven years later, his foot had washed ashore. It had taken all that time to travel a couple of hundred yards. The guards notified the man’s parents, who had long ago accepted his death. They left the disposal of the bones to the police. The guards, following established practice, gave the foot a Catholic burial in Cahirciveen cemetery. The limb is held to be an essential part of the whole, and, where the trunk of a body is missing, the limb serves as the symbolic remains.

  This theological problem of what exactly constitutes a human body, and a human being, had convulsed Kerry and Ireland in the year 1982–83, when the country had considered amending its Constitution to ensure that abortion would be outlawed for all time. The Catholic Church announced that life began at conception and threw its weight behind what came to be known as the pro-life amendment campaign.

  There was much learned discussion conducted by priests, lawyers and doctors as to whether or not a fertilised egg was a human being. The Catholic Church said that it was. So, too, in a signed statement did seventy-four of the ninety doctors, obstetricians, gynaecologists and radiologists then working in the Kingdom of Kerry.

  The debate, in gruesome detail, had gripped the attention of the nation. Many of the details were to be repeated in the public inquiry that followed the finding of the Kerry baby. Those details were to be flashed around the world. Ironically, it was on the shore of White Strand at Cahirciveen that the first transatlantic telegraph cable linking the old world with the new was laid in 1850.

  The burial of the Cahirciveen baby was an emotional occasion. Local schoolchildren provided an escort from the undertaker’s to the cemetery. Some of them had seen the infant in its coffin. Previously, during the anti-abortion campaign, some of these children had been shown film slides of a preserved foetus in a jar. ‘The most dangerous place to be at the moment is in the mother’s womb’ they had heard Bishop Joseph Cassidy say on national radio just before the campaign votes were cast. Now, a mere seven months later, they escorted to its grave a baby that had safely escaped the womb, only to meet instant death.

  The death of babies, in or out of the womb, was no stranger to them. Between the successful passage of the amendment in September 1983 and the discovery of the Kerry baby in April 1984 the schoolchildren of Cahirciveen had held a day-long seminar, under the supervision of their teachers, on the life and death of one of their peer group, Anne Lovett. On 30 January 1984, the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl had been found dying in a grotto devoted to the Virgin Mary, in Granard, County Longford. Alongside her lay the corpse of her new-born son. The young mother perished of childbirth and exposure. Three weeks later, her fourteen-year-old sister apparently killed herself. Nobody knew why these things had happened. It was officially regarded as a private family tragedy. The Cahirciveen schoolchildren told their teachers that their parents were the last people they would turn to for help if they found themselves pregnant. Families could not cope with that sort of thing, they said.

  2. Babies Everywhere

  After the state’s only pathologist, Dr John Harbison, had pronounced the Kerry baby murdered, the guards began to search for its parents. The local police chief, Superintendent Donal Sullivan, began his investigation in the most conversational way, talking to people he met in Cahirciveen on the Sunday night of his return from Killarney, where the post-mortem had been held.

  He confirmed later, to a lawyer for the tribunal, that the purpose was ‘to get the rumour around and get the word on the streets’. That way there was a better chance of getting information, he said. He also circulated a questionnaire to each family, which the police collected when it was filled in. The schoolchildren were all individually questioned.

  Cahirciveen has a population of 1,428. The collated information profiled an Irish town, where such features are not normally given public recognition. Families were named where incest was suspected; a married man was having an affair with a young woman; the female partners in broken romances were checked out; women who had to get married because of pregnancy were reported; a woman was nominated whose husband had been barred from her home on foot of a court order.

  The search spread beyond the town. Hippies were reported and investigated. Travelling families got visits from the police. A man with a criminal record and a common-law wife was checked out. The police visited a man who merely had ‘a female living with him’ and was in a different category entirely, as was the married woman who had ‘a man’ living with her. Information was given on a pregnant woman known to have paid a visit to England. A ten-year-old girl said her next-door neighbour was ‘after having a baby’. The police were even given the name of a woman who had been prescribed certain tablets to help in her pregnancy. The name of the informant was confidential, of course.

  Confidence was not always preserved, however. An elderly man who had been imprisoned during the IRA campaign in the fifties, and gone on hunger strike in pursuit of political status, did not ta
ke kindly to the garda (police) visit. He thought himself, mistakenly, the object of what he perceived to be renewed state harassment. The police reassured him that they only wanted to talk to him in connection with what he might have seen on his evening walks on White Strand. ‘So and so’ had mentioned that this was his custom. Later, the elderly man visited ‘so and so’ and grumbled that the ancient Irish political custom of never telling the police anything had been betrayed.

  One woman did benefit from the unexpected intrusion into her private life. The baby to which she had secretly given birth in her family home four months before, causing her to withdraw totally from the public gaze and stay indoors, was officially registered after a visit from the guards, and she was persuaded by a welfare officer to apply for the unmarried mother’s benefit of fifty-one pounds a week. Now she walks the streets openly with her child. She and her mother, with the child in the pram, are still to be seen daily scavenging the town dump. A financial safety net of some kind has been provided.

  The net which the police threw over Cahirciveen, and neighbouring Waterville and Killorglin and Sneem and Glencarr, around the tourist trail of the Ring of Kerry in fact, yielded nothing. The woman whom a nurse had seen walking on the road by White Strand was innocent. The father of a fifteen-year-old girl had noticed that she mentioned rape in her diary, but nothing came of this, though the police established that her parents were ‘responsible’.