After the conference, seventy-one of the ninety medical practitioners in Kerry backed the pro-life campaign, stating that ‘from a medical point of view, human life begins at the moment of conception and is therefore always entitled to the full protection of the law and of the Constitution from that time’.
Signatories to the statement included every doctor then working in Kerry who was subsequently to testify to the Kerry babies tribunal: Mr John Creedon, consultant obstetrician; Mr Bob McEneaney, consultant psychiatrist; Dr R.F. Chute, GP; Dr Aidan Daly, GP; Dr Liam Hayes, GP; Dr Áine O’Sullivan, GP.
The doctors spoke again on the eve of the vote, adding to their list of seventy-one the names of three more who did not wish their absence, due to holidays, from the original list to be misconstrued as anti-amendment. The doctors were now explicit about where they stood:
The pro-life amendment campaign is necessary to protect unborn babies from legal abortion. Further, we support the university professors of obstetrics and gynaecology in Dublin, Cork and Galway, and the distinguished team of jurists who have confirmed that the purpose of the amendment will not alter medical practice as it now exists. We agree and we confirm that no pregnant woman will be put at risk as a result of the adoption of the amendment.
The Kerryman published a thought . . . ‘And oh, dear mom, what right is thine, to kill me on the road to birth?’
The amendment was passed on 7 September 1983. The leader of the Irish Labour party, and Tánaiste (second-in-command) in the coalition government with Fine Gael, Dick Spring, who was one of the few public figures in Kerry to oppose the amendment, commented that it ‘enshrined in the constitution an attitude to women that borders on contempt’.
Marguerite Egan, founder of the minuscule Kerry branch of the anti-amendment campaign, hoped that the people of the county would now turn their attention to the ‘abolition of illegitimacy and the introduction of family planning’.
Joanne Hayes was then in the first month of her third pregnancy. Though she visited Dr Liam Hayes regularly to arrange a minor operation for daughter Yvonne’s thumb, seeing him the week before she gave birth to the baby that would bring her to police attention, he did not notice that she was carrying an unborn child. His partner, Aidan Daly, who saw Joanne twenty-four hours after she brought that unborn child into the world, did not notice that she had given birth. Mr John Creedon, who did suspect that a baby had been born to her and was now missing, released her from hospital to make her own way in the world. ‘I wish someone would define the medical ethics in such a situation’, said this man who had signed a petition that bound him to protect the fertilised egg that his co-signer had not noticed.
On 1 May 1984, the police came looking for the woman who had, all unnoticed, brought the baby in her womb through the amendment bushes that the men had been beating. Her women friends had noticed, though.
7. Martina Rohan
I
On the day before Christmas Eve 1983, work finished early at the sports complex and the staff started their ten-day holiday. Most went, as usual, to the Meadowlands hotel, where they met up with workers from the regional technical college, also employed by the local VEC (Vocational Education Committee).
Joanne Hayes, who had not been rostered for work that day, was down town shopping. In the late afternoon she went to the hotel and joined the gang in their celebrations. She had parcels with her. At half past seven Martina Rohan, who shared receptionist duties at the complex with Joanne, left the bar and went to the TV lounge to watch Coronation Street, of which she was a fanatic follower. Joanne went with her.
The small TV lounge is an inhospitable place where patrons seldom go. Cream paint on the walls, red drapes and worn red carpet provide perfunctory decoration. A solitary light bulb under a red lampshade throws gloomy illumination on the horse-prints, brass plates and dried ferns in a massive vase. The fireplace is blocked off. Four large uneasy chairs, a sofa and three low formica tables accommodate telly-watchers.
After half an hour of the soap opera, the two women remained in this room and talked about Christmas. Joanne showed Martina the gifts she had bought for her family. There was one extra item in a plastic bag that bore the logo of a men’s boutique. The sweater in it was too small, Martina noticed, for Joanne’s brothers Ned and Mike. It was for Jeremiah, Joanne said. Martina asked her how Jeremiah would explain such a generous and personal present to his wife. Joanne replied that he would think of something.
‘She’s expecting,’ said Martina. She doesn’t know why – the words just came out. There was something in the nonchalance of Joanne’s tone that indicated ignorance of reality.
Joanne ‘shot up’ in her chair. ‘How dare he,’ she said. She burst into tears. She gathered her things and left the hotel at once. Martina followed her out to the car park, urging her to come back and talk. It was pouring rain. Joanne was four miles from home, without transport and loaded with parcels. The last bus had long since gone. Joanne asked her to send Jeremiah out.
He was drinking at the bar. He went out to the car park. Ten minutes later he came back. Joanne was not with him. Shortly afterwards the hotel paged him for a phone call. It was Joanne, calling him from a coinbox down the road. He was brief and then he resumed drinking. Joanne hitched home in the wind and the rain and the dark, his present with her.
Martina reproached him. He could at least have driven her back to the farm. He was at first brusque. Then he talked a little. He loved Joanne. He loved his wife, too, ‘but in a different way’. Her parents did not approve of the marriage, he said. They were farmers of some substance.
Martina had asked Joanne in the car park to come and visit her over the Christmas break. Joanne did not come. None of her friends in town saw her. The new-year festivities came and went and she did not appear on the social scene. She had begun the deep withdrawal into self-imposed isolation that lasted four months and ended in birth, death and disaster, in the middle of the night, back at the farm out of which she had come six years earlier, at the age of nineteen, to start her promising job in town.
II
The complex opened as a leisure centre in 1977, was quickly successful and began to employ more staff within a year. Joanne and Martina were sent there by Manpower, the state employment agency, in 1978 and they both began work as receptionists the same day. At first acquaintance she always struck strangers as being very tiny. She is four-foot-seven inches tall. She also struck her co-workers, in the beginning, as shy to the point of timidity.
Her previous six-month stint in a Tralee supermarket required of her only that she sit silently at the checkpoint from nine to five punching a cash register, after which she went straight back home. Now she had to receive the public, answer their enquiries, make arrangements for them, mingle with the rest of the staff and work late hours.
Initially, she was only at ease in the company of the children who flocked to the complex. ‘If I heard a child cry, I’d run away,’ says Martina. ‘Joanne would always run towards it, get down on her knees and hug and kiss and chat to the child.’
The atmosphere in the new complex was, they are all agreed, ‘fantastic’. There was no manager then. It was run more like a co-operative than anything. People came there to enjoy themselves. It was infectious. The staff enjoyed themselves. It was a hopeful, expanding place to work in, with work to take pride in, and an air of permanence and thriving custom.
The place was frequented by people of all professions and none, old and young, female and male. The unemployed, the mothers and fathers, the guards and solicitors, the doctors and labourers, the white-collared and blue-collared, mingled together. When their clothes came off, for the swimming pool or sauna or gymnasium or sports pitches, they were equal.
Martina Rohan, Aileen Enright, Mary Murphy and Joanne Hayes were all young single women. At first the three townies used to go off together after work for a drink and a bit of craic. They had the homes of their parents to go back to, work to look forward to and spare money in
their pockets. After a while, Joanne did not automatically return to the farm each evening. She began to hang out with them, not saying much, but eagerly tagging along. Sometimes, when spirits were high, she’d roll down the window of whatever car they found themselves in and yell out to pedestrians. There were pubs and discos and bright lights and fast-food places for their entertainment.
There were, invariably, drinks after work. The timeless, worldwide, men-only ritual of the bar had succumbed in the Sixties to an influx of spending single women, and then married women, who also felt thirsty after a day’s paid labour, and who mingled freely with single and married men.
Martin Kennedy, lawyer for the garda superintendents, was to express shock during the tribunal that these women would one day attend when he heard that Peggy Houlihan, a married woman who worked as a cleaner at the complex, engaged in this normal healthy practice. She was recalling an after-work drink with Joanne Hayes and Jeremiah Locke.
‘Drinking with a married man. I see,’ he declared.
Joanne’s women friends noticed, in the beginning, that she did not have many clothes. Her dress was as quiet and unvaried as her lifestyle. When celebration days or birthdays came round, they used to give her presents of fashionable gear. She began to blossom. She became quite assured. She did not stand out in a crowd, but she was no longer invisible.
On the other hand, the women did not always go around in a crowd; nor did they go out together every night. On those mornings when they’d come in, grinning and exhausted, to tell individual tales of the night before and where they’d been and who they’d been with, Joanne would have nothing to say. If she had not been with them, she had been at the farm, watching TV and reading her favourite magazine, True Romance.
Her social life effectively consisted of drinks after work at the Meadowlands. Jeremiah Locke used to be there. He was one of the few with a car. If the drinking developed into a prolonged session, he’d drop Martina off at her house and give Joanne a lift out to the farm.
He was on sufficiently friendly terms with the women to invite them to drop in at the reception which followed his wedding in 1981. Martina Rohan was working late, but Joanne and Aileen Enright, who both finished at three that afternoon, called into the reception and joined in the singing and dancing and drinking. Jeremiah kissed all the women goodbye as he set off on his honeymoon. Shaking hands died out decades ago. Even the priest kisses the bride. So Jeremiah kissed Aileen and Joanne and the others and went away with his wife.
His marriage was barely six months old when Joanne started coming in to work in the mornings with her own stories of where she’d been the night before, but she never said who she’d been with. Her friends didn’t ask. They knew. They also knew not to ask. It was fairly unspeakable.
Joanne Hayes remembers the night she and Jeremiah Locke became lovers. It was 26 October, a bank holiday, she was to tell the tribunal when they insisted on knowing.
She and Jeremiah were not discreet. They engaged in horseplay in the staff canteen, behind the reception area, throwing tea bags and cups of water at each other. They were bringing their private life into the workplace. Jeremiah Locke’s wife Mary came to the complex and had a public blazing row in the reception area with Joanne.
There was a certain amount of embarrassment about the situation among her friends. There was quite a lot of anxiety. Martina Rohan spoke her mind just once, at an early stage in the affair. She voiced her opinion on the hopelessness of the relationship, and the hurt to Jeremiah Locke’s wife. She was mainly concerned about Joanne, who was still regarded as naive. Joanne cut her off abruptly.
The head of the VEC, John Falvey, sent separately for Joanne and Jeremiah to express concern. The sports complex was not a normal business enterprise and its viability depended on relationships with the public. The relationship between Joanne and Jeremiah was becoming scandalously public. Both denied it.
Martina Rohan was becoming anxious for other reasons. Both women were employed in a temporary capacity, on contracts that were renewed every six months, with the promise held out that one day they’d be made permanent. They appealed without success to their union and to Dick Spring of the Labour Party to fight for their job security. Now Mr Falvey began to send regular letters to them both, reminding them that they were temporary workers, hinting that the contracts might not be renewed. There was a recession, after all. Or was this a warning shot across the bows?
On one occasion, after receiving such letters, both women became highly agitated. They went to the Meadowlands and talked the situation over. That evening stands out in both their minds. A job, in the early Eighties, was worth its weight in gold. Martina’s father had been made redundant and she and her sister were the only wage-earners in the household. Joanne was the only wage-earner in hers.
That was when Joanne was pregnant with Yvonne.
In February 1984, when Joanne was again visibly pregnant, she and Martina were called to an interview board. One of them would be given a permanent job.
Martina got the job. She was not a mother.
Joanne’s temporary contract would be reviewed when the time came. Her chances of renewal must have appeared slight, because to the outsider her relationship with Jeremiah must have seemed as ongoing as her pregnancies.
‘When I didn’t get that permanent job I felt bitter. I think I didn’t get it because I was pregnant again,’ she was to say in a private conversation during the tribunal hearings. She had just gone through a bitter day in the witness box, but she hadn’t told how she had felt in that month of February, pregnant, abandoned by her lover and facing unemployment. Nor did she tell them that her regraded job had been advertised on 6 April. In any case, the lawyers were too busy castigating her for that night of 13 April on the farm. They were interested in the moments after birth, not the long period of gestation. The fertilised egg had survived its time in the womb, after all.
On Tuesday 1 May Martina Rohan left home to work the 3 pm-to-10 pm shift. On her way to the complex a workmate pulled up alongside her on a bicycle. He wanted to give her a lift on his crossbar. She laughed him off but he insisted that there was something she ought to know. As the bicycle carried them both away from the kerb, he said that the special branch police were waiting for her up at the office. They wanted to interview her. ‘Joanne has been arrested,’ he said. ‘They’ve got her down at the station for the Cahirciveen baby.’
She remembers that the whole frame of the bike began to shake.
She remembers the previous weekend. Joanne had come into the complex with a doctor’s sick certificate that explained her fortnight’s absence from work. She would be resuming work on Monday, she said. She propped Yvonne up on the counter. She said she had been in hospital with a miscarriage. Why hadn’t she told her pals, Martina wanted to know. They would have come to visit her. That was a terrible thing to go through alone. Did Jeremiah know? He didn’t. She asked Joanne if she would like Martina to tell him. Joanne didn’t want him to know. She began to cry.
On Monday, at work, Joanne had been quiet and miserable. On Tuesday she was in the police station and two detectives were waiting for Martina. The two men made jokes about the way she was frantically smoking. There was no need to worry, they said. The Cahirciveen baby was mentioned almost immediately. ‘There’s no way Joanne would do that. You’ve got the wrong woman,’ Martina said. They said they just wanted to know about Joanne anyway. She told them that her workmates knew she was pregnant, that she had resisted all conversation about it and that she had lost the baby only a fortnight ago.
One of them wrote down her words and then put the written sheets of paper in front of her, requesting her signature on them. ‘I suppose I’m signing my life away,’ she said. ‘Not to worry,’ they said. She didn’t read the statement.
That night she went to the house of Mary Murphy, now O’Riordan, and the two of them talked and talked.
8. Mary O’Riordan
Mary Murphy, a lifeguard in the complex, had bee
n the first person there to ask Joanne if she was pregnant with Yvonne. It had been commonly voiced but never confirmed, because no one had ever spoken to her about it. When Mary returned from her honeymoon with husband John and heard the rumour, she decided to talk to her. She said straight out that everyone was saying Joanne was pregnant. ‘Is it true, girl?’ she asked.
‘Oh thank God you’ve said it Murph. I was dying for someone to know. I’ve no one to talk to.’ Joanne was then about five months pregnant. The two women became close. Mary had never much been a feature of the social scene, having a steady boyfriend. Anyway, she says, looking back on her life at twenty-one, she only drank coffee then.
Joanne’s family was reticent about the impending birth. There was embarrassment and stiffness and worry in the house. Shortly after Yvonne was born, Mary went out to Abbeydorney and the family was still distinctly uneasy, not knowing how to introduce the child.
Mary O’Riordan did not afterwards discuss contraception with her friend. Joanne was, after all, then twenty-three years of age, and no longer an unschooled girl in from the country. She had already had a baby. ‘That’s a hard knock to get. You assume a woman doesn’t take chances after that. And you’d assume that Jeremiah . . .’
It came as a revelation to Mary O’Riordan in any case, in the course of the tribunal, that Joanne and Jeremiah had actually been having a regular, long-standing relationship. ‘I thought she’d only been with him a couple of times. That they’d begun as friends, wandered into it and wandered out again.’ On the rare occasions during the pregnancy with Yvonne when Joanne’s relationship with Jeremiah had been raised, the conversation had been brief. Joanne did not wish to talk about it. Mary thought they’d been having a ‘now you’ve learned your lesson about going out with married men’ discussion, even though Joanne declared affection for him still.
A Woman to Blame Page 6