A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  Superintendent Courtney had poked his finger into her shoulder and really frightened her, she said. He had a habit of pointing his finger at people, said the superintendent, nothing more.

  The police, said Ned, had told him to get down on his knees and make an act of contrition. He resented scurrilous allegations about religion, said Detective Dillon. He could not remember whether it was Detective Dillon or Detective O’Mahony who had upended him on the floor and tried to grab his testicles, said Ned. It’s not the sort of assault you’re likely to make a mistake about, the detectives pointed out.

  One of the policemen, said Mike, had put an arm round him and thrown mock punches at his stomach while walking him round the room. They didn’t hurt, but there’s nothing friendly about a policeman’s arm around you as you walk round a room in a police station. He was frightened, he said. The policemen denied it. They told him he’d never milk a cow again, he said. It was denied.

  One of the guards, said Kathleen, had brought a moveable phone into the room in Abbeydorney station, plugged it in, taken calls and said that every call he was getting proved how many lies she was telling.

  The guards proved that there is no moveable phone in Abbeydorney station.

  She had been slapped across the back of the head, said Kathleen, had complained ‘Oh, my head,’ and been told ‘Never mind your old head.’ It was denied. She had been threatened with incarceration in Killarney mental home, said Kathleen. It was denied. She had been asked if she had voted pro-life in the amendment, had said yes, and had been jeered that the neighbours would think her evil now. It was denied. Aspersions had been cast on her mother’s appearance: ‘Look at the cut of her, thrown into a corner,’ she said they had said. It was denied.

  She had been compared, said Mary Hayes, to an old tinker going the roads. It was denied. She had been told what to say and had said it, she charged. It was denied. Liam Moloney had asked her if she had confessed to the priest what she was confessing to the police, she said. He agreed that he had.

  The family had been under virtual arrest, they said. Their presence in the police station was purely voluntary and they were free to leave any time they wished, came the reply.

  How, asked those in charge of the internal police inquiry, had statements been obtained to charges that couldn’t be sustained? Some of the guards, acting under the instructions of legal advisers, refused to answer some of the questions. The inquiry aborted.

  10. Tribunal

  The minister for justice responded to the public clamour with a tribunal of inquiry into the Kerry babies affair. It was set up in a hurry, and it was thought that it would finish quickly. The tribunal met on 28 December and agreed to sit in Tralee from 7 January for an estimated three weeks. The costs of legal representation were not guaranteed either to the police or to the Hayes family.

  Top legal brains in the country faded away like snow off a ditch. Between them, the twenty-five guards and three superintendents mustered enough money to pay fees for a little while and lawyers who had scarcely been heard of were found for them.

  The Hayes family, without a single wage-earner between the six of them, acquired a lawyer whose previous experience had been almost entirely confined to civil work in the employment appeals tribunal. He had taken sick and had returned to court only months before and was, unlike experienced senior counsel, available for work at short notice. He was hired with no guarantee of pay only two days before the tribunal opened. The Hayes family solicitor undertook to pay his hotel expenses while in Tralee.

  The tribunal judge, Kevin Lynch, with one year’s experience on the bench, had made his name as a barrister in matters of commercial and civil litigation. None of the fifteen legal men, comprising judge, senior and junior barristers and solicitors, had ever witnessed childbirth. ‘Is it possible,’ the judge was to ask ‘for a woman to give birth standing up?’ Women have given birth underwater, in aeroplanes, in comas, lying unnaturally flat on their backs in hospital beds, and even after death, but this man wondered if they could do it standing up. Only one had even a glancing experience of matters connected with the female reproductive system. Martin Kennedy, senior counsel for the three superintendents, had taken part in the pro-life campaign, canvassing in the plush seaside suburb of Dalkey near Dublin. While Jeremiah Locke was engaged in serial impregnation of two women, Mr Kennedy had been assuring voters, on behalf of a Fianna Fáil party that opposed contraception for single people, that the baby in a woman’s womb needed constitutional protection.

  The primary aim and function of the tribunal was to find out how the police had conducted themselves in Tralee garda station on 1 May and afterwards, to inquire ‘into the circumstances of the preferment and withdrawal of charges’. It might have been that the police procedure was at all times correct and their criminal methodology beyond criticism, and that they had had no choice but to proceed with charges, given the information in their possession; it might have been the complete opposite. It was the tribunal’s job to find out.

  The tribunal’s second function was to inquire into ‘the allegations made by the Hayes family’ against the police.

  The tribunal’s third function was to inquire into ‘any relevant matters’.

  Justice Lynch interpreted these terms of reference on three occasions during the inquiry. The government, he said, ‘have asked me to investigate, as best I can, the birth of . . . Miss Joanne Hayes’s baby in Abbeydorney’. Then he said of that birth: ‘It is not really the exercise I am engaged on here at all . . . it doesn’t matter a thrawneen whether the baby was born inside or outside, IF THERE WAS ONLY ONE BABY.’ Then he said that the ‘only subsisting allegations’ which the tribunal had to investigate were those made by the Hayes family.

  The judge had set his mind on finding out if Joanne Hayes had had twins, if she had given birth inside or outside the house should there be only one baby, and whether the Hayes family were telling the truth about the police.

  Since no charges had ever been preferred against the Hayes family in respect of the baby found at Abbeydorney, the death of that infant might properly have been regarded as a private family tragedy, as had been the case with Anne Lovett.

  However, the third term of reference, ‘any relevant matters’, allowed the tribunal to conduct, in effect, the trial that was never ‘meant to be and the police lawyers took the opportunity that had originally been denied them to present what the Director of Public Prosecutions had called ‘this amazing case’.

  A key element of the police case was the suggestion of ‘superfecundation’. On the opening day of the tribunal Mr Michael Moriarty, senior counsel of the legal team appointed to help the judge, emphasised that expert opinion considered this to be ‘an extremely rare and unlikely event’.

  Five months were to pass before that expert should finally arrive to give his opinion. During those months the men of the tribunal and the police aired their own opinions on whether the woman brought before them could have achieved the unlikely. Joanne Hayes became the real-life model of the biological trial-and-error experiments conducted by five all-male teams of lawyers, three per team, representing the judge, the director of public prosecutions, the superintendents of police, the guards and the Hayeses. The members of her family were called to provide the circumstantial detail for this or that experiment.

  First, though, the tribunal set the stage by calling in her friends, her employers and Jeremiah Locke.

  11. Tom Flynn

  The judge sat up on his dais, the legal men ranged themselves below him, and the women friends of Joanne Hayes were brought forward one by one to the anvil of the witness box and forced under oath to deny her. It was quite simply done. Had they known, the question was put to Martina Rohan, Aileen Enright, Mary O’Riordan, Peggy Houlihan and Mary Shanahan, that she was pregnant?

  They had.

  Had she lied to them upon her release from hospital, claiming she had had a miscarriage?

  She had.

  Mary O’Riordan tr
ied to soften the blow. Asked by Mr Anthony Kennedy, counsel for the guards, if she was disappointed that Joanne had misled her, she replied ‘No, she went through very hard times.’

  Dermot McCarthy, senior counsel for the Hayeses, had Mary O’Riordan recalled later because, he said, information which had just come to him indicated that a wrong impression had been given that Joanne had lied to Mary O’Riordan.

  Mr McCarthy then asked his witness: ‘Did she explicitly tell you that she had lost the baby in hospital?’

  Ms O’Riordan had to say ‘Yes.’

  It was not Mr McCarthy’s finest hour, though subsequent events were to show that it was not his worst.

  Peggy Houlihan was asked by Martin Kennedy to account for her temerity in having a drink after work with Jeremiah Locke. He observed that she, a married woman, was ‘out drinking with a married man. I see.’ Moreover, he declaimed, this married man was known to indulge in affairs. Mr Kennedy’s indignation mounted as he pursued the implications of this. ‘Is your husband alive? What did your husband think about that?’ He asked her how her husband was supposed to fetch his own tea, while she was in the pub.

  All the women were asked if they knew a certain Tom Flynn. They didn’t. His name had been found, written in biro, on the mattress on which Joanne Hayes slept. He was, insisted Martin Kennedy, Joanne’s lover before she met Jeremiah Locke. As his name rang and recurred through the proceedings, Tom Flynn acquired the notoreity of the wild colonial boy, Jack Dougan from nearby Castlemaine, who had emigrated to Australia in the previous century, where he robbed the rich to help the poor, according to the ballad. Where, however, was Tom Flynn? Mr Kennedy, acting under instructions from Superintendent John Courtney, and in hot pursuit of the theory of superfecundation, wanted to know.

  The people of Tralee knew, but they didn’t enlighten him. They chose instead to ridicule a tribunal that appeared to them to be increasingly ridiculous, by sporting T-shirts that had been hurriedly printed by a local entrepreneur. ‘I’m Tom Flynn’ the T-shirts proclaimed.

  Weeks were to pass before the tribunal established that Tom Flynn used to work in a shop selling mattresses, that he had emigrated to America in 1969 when Joanne Hayes was a ten-year-old, and that he had never returned home.

  Ridicule changed to shock when the men who did know Joanne Hayes came forward to testify.

  12. Jeremiah Locke

  Liam Bohan, manager of the sports complex, read out to the court a letter that Joanne had written to him from the mental home to which she had been transferred after a night in prison. It was the first of many private documents concerning her that the world was invited to hear. As he read it out, Joanne Hayes left the court in tears.

  Dear Liam,

  I don’t know how to start off this letter. I am so sorry for causing such an embarrassment to all of you working with me. Please forgive me. I want to thank you for all the help you gave me since you came to the complex. You were new there when I first got pregnant, but still you never said anything to me.

  Don’t ask me why I did what I did because I don’t know or I will never know. I am so ashamed for what I did and most of all I am sorry for getting everyone I love involved. It must be all the pressure building up that made me do it. I really don’t know. When the gardai took me down to the station on Tuesday they were delighted because, according to them, they had the murderer for the baby in Cahirciveen.

  I had to make a false statement because they told me that if I didn’t my mother would be jailed and Yvonne would be put into an orphanage. I am now in a hospital for mental cases. Am I mental, Liam? I can’t think straight anymore. I don’t mind being punished for what I did, but I didn’t want to be punished for the baby in Cahirciveen.

  Mr Mann came to see me today. He told me Jer is having a pretty rough time around the town. Please Liam don’t be too hard on him. I have ruined his life also. I really love him.

  You are a real nice person and thanks for everything you did for me. Say a prayer for me.

  Love, Joanne

  In the event, Jeremiah Locke’s employers were not at all hard on him and he was transferred discreetly to another VEC workplace. Joanne Hayes had no such luck. Mr Bohan and Mr Falvey convened a meeting of the management board of the sports complex the night she was arrested and decided to go ahead on 13 May with the competition for her redefined clerical job. Although her baby was then found and bail for her obtained, it was not found possible to change the date of the examination and it went ahead twenty-four hours after she was released from the mental home from which she had written to Liam Bohan. She was unfit to attend.

  On the day after Mr Bohan revealed to the tribunal that she thought him a ‘real nice person’, Jeremiah Locke took the stand to tell what Joanne Hayes thought of him.

  He introduced himself as a married man with two children. Although he has, in fact, three children, the tribunal accepted his sworn word on the matter. His third child is Yvonne Hayes. After Joanne gave birth, he went to see the mother and daughter in hospital. He had seen Yvonne only once since that day in 1983. He had been away on holidays when Joanne went into hospital a second time, in April 1984. He heard about that in a pub. He understood that Joanne had miscarried this one of his children but she congratulated him, he said, on the birth of a daughter that very same month to his wife and himself.

  He knew, he said, that Joanne loved him very much. Asked if he loved her he said, ‘I did, I suppose, yes, I did love her . . . it depends on what you mean by love. I was a married man.’

  He and Martin Kennedy then had a detailed discussion on how, where and when he had had ‘sexual intercourse’ with Joanne Hayes. Was it in a car, on the side of the road, or at home when his wife was not there, Mr Kennedy wanted to know. ‘We had sex together’ in his Mini car said Mr Locke, when he used to drive her home. Mr Kennedy produced an ordnance survey map and asked him to pinpoint the back lane in which intimacy had occurred.

  At this point Justice Lynch interrupted the discussion between the two men and asked how it was relevant to the tribunal. Mr Kennedy answered: ‘If I can show that Joanne Hayes had a previous sexual history . . . and that during her relationship she was also having sex with others; and if one of these others had blood-group A, then it will be . . . not only possible but probable that twins born of that union could have had blood-group A in one, and O in the other’.

  On that basis, said Mr Lynch, cross-examination could continue. On that basis, and because the expert on superfecundation was not called for another sixteen weeks, licence was given to the men to speculate virtually every day on the sexuality of Joanne Hayes. The daily coupling of her name with the term ‘sexual intercourse’ allowed her character to pass into ferocious and lurid legend. She became a snigger in filthy mouths.

  In the meantime a reprieved Mr Martin Kennedy wanted to know, on behalf of the three police superintendents, if Jeremiah Locke had intercourse with Joanne Hayes on every occasion that he drove her home. No, said Mr Locke. How exactly did it start, Mr Kennedy was curious and wanted to know – did the woman suggest it or the man?

  ‘It takes two,’ said the much younger Mr Locke.

  Mr Anthony Kennedy wanted to know if they had used contraception. They hadn’t. He wanted to know if Joanne Hayes was a virgin when Jeremiah Locke met her. She wasn’t. Was it a problem that his wife was pregnant at the same time? It wasn’t. Would Mr Locke agree with Mr Kennedy that Joanne Hayes saw Yvonne as a compromise, since she couldn’t have him permanently with her? He would.

  After Joanne had confronted him at the Christmas party about the fact that both she and his wife were pregnant by him, he used to meet her still but ‘it was nothing like before’, he explained to Mr Moriarty. In any case, as he had previously told Anthony Kennedy, ‘I had no intention of breaking with my wife.’

  Of his day in the police station on 1 May, when the guards thanked him for helping with their enquiries and then released him without charge, he had no complaints, except to say that they ‘
spoke hard’ with him.

  A priest went on national radio to protest at the nature of the questions being put to Jeremiah Locke. Father Paul Byrne, secretary of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors, objected to lawyers asking if Mr Locke was in love with his wife and whether he used contraceptives.

  No priest ever publicly objected to the questions put to Joanne Hayes, who was brought before the tribunal the following week.

  13. Scream Quietly

  After hearing them all, the judge declared that this was ‘a very odd family’. The Hayeses had been brought into the tribunal one by one, while the rest remained outside, and asked questions about each other. Sometimes their answers tallied, sometimes they did not.

  Such procedure is the stuff of psychological textbooks or successful television entertainments: while Kevin waits offstage, Ursula recounts from memory an intimate event that involved her and him; while Ursula waits offstage, Kevin recalls the same incident; the audience laughs its leg off at the wildly contradictory detail, the differing emphasis on what was important.

  Songs have been written about such things. You wore blue, no it was red, I was on time, no you were late, ah yes, I remember it well.

  There are times when things are not so funny, when a family chooses or is compelled by fear to ignore what is happening in its midst. A daughter comes home on holiday without her husband. She stays one week, two, then three, growing more and more miserable. She says nothing. The doctor is called. She goes into the mental home. ‘My husband was sick and I got the treatment,’ she later says of the ending of a marriage which she could not handle, her family could not face and her husband stayed away from.

  Fifteen-year-old Anne Lovett was visibly pregnant in the small village of Granard, County Longford, and her teachers and neighbours assumed the family were coping. Her father was often seen fetching her home from the pool hall. She died in childbirth, in the open air, alone. ‘Even had I noticed she was pregnant,’ said the parish priest, ‘I could hardly just come out and say “You’re pregnant.”’ The state called it a family tragedy. Six weeks later her fourteen-year-old sister killed herself. That was a family tragedy, too. The state couldn’t face it. As long as they die alone, and no one else is involved . . .