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A Woman to Blame

Page 12

by Nell McCafferty


  15. ‘Please Sir?’

  Three weeks had passed, there was no sign of the police being called to account for their actions and the tribunal was still mired in a squalid probe into the life of Joanne Hayes.

  The mattress from her bed lay in a corner of the court-room. The state of the sheets on which she had slept had been described by a forensic scientist, as had her nightdresses and her underwear. Her gynaecologist, John Creedon, had come into the tribunal and read out everything that had ever been recorded in her confidential records, including the dates and times of her menstrual flow since 1982, the width of her uterus after giving birth to Yvonne in 1983 and the kind of catgut used in suturing her afterwards. He described her vulva when he saw her again in hospital in April 1984, and the state her breasts might have been in, if he had examined them, was explored in detail, necessarily imaginative, by both him and the lawyers.

  The judge had requested that a sample of blood be taken from one-year-old Yvonne, in a bid to trace her mother’s previous sexual history. The tribunal was already in possession of the blood of Joanne Hayes.

  When she took the stand Joanne Hayes was forced to give details of the exact date and place of the miscarriage that had taken place in 1982 and a description of the clots of blood that had seeped down her legs then in the toilet of the sports complex.

  ‘When did you first make love?’ she was asked. ‘How long before Jeremiah Locke was it that you first had sex with somebody else?’ Her belief that he was unhappy with his wife and would one day make a home with her attracted knowing scorn. That was the stuff of fairytales, ‘like a prince finding the princess and putting her up on his white charger and riding off into the sunset’.

  As for her thinking he would eventually go to her, would she care to define what ‘eventually’ meant? ‘Never, I suppose,’ she responded and was humbled. She was made to relive the Christmas night when she discovered that his wife, too, was pregnant, and he gave her short shrift; made to describe the ‘quality of the pain’ the day she went into labour in the farmhouse; asked to agree that ‘you had no intention of allowing that child to be alive in this world after it left your body?’ and forced to describe the appearance of the dead baby at dawn, ‘crouched up or cold?’ It was cold, she said.

  She broke down repeatedly. Her tears and sobs and laboured breathing were a daily feature, an hourly feature and then a minute-by-minute occurrence as the interminable questions came at her in relays from the five legal teams gathered around her. Once there was a weekend break, and she came back with a mouth broken into sores and the judge observed that the weekend break hadn’t done her any good. He saw no point in adjourning every time she broke down. ‘If I rise now I will be rising every five minutes. Which is better, sooner or later?’ The sooner they were done with her, the better for her and for them.

  Before they were done with her, Joanne Hayes had a total collapse. She signalled its coming by asking the judge through tears, ‘Please sir, may I go to the toilet?’ He did not hear her. He was listening to her lawyer, who was on his feet and had precedence.

  Dermot McCarthy pointed out that his client was under stress and needed to compose herself. ‘She is going to remain under stress all morning and will have to do the best she can,’ the judge replied. Brian Curtin whispered to Dermot McCarthy and Dermot McCarthy murmured to the judge that his client needed to go to the toilet. The judge then turned to her.

  ‘Please sir?’ she asked again.

  He granted her request. She bolted from the court room. The tribunal adjourned. When it resumed, the judge was informed by a doctor that Joanne Hayes was in a state of acute anxiety. She was hyperventilating, vomiting, shaky and scarcely able to answer questions put to her. He had sedated her.

  While they awaited her recovery, Kathleen Hayes was brought on to fill in the time. This tribunal was not going to waste a minute.

  She said that the police had mocked her for having voted in favour of the pro-life amendment campaign, against abortion. It was nonsense to say that the police had brought religion into their interrogation of her, said police lawyer Anthony Kennedy.

  He then questioned her about her catholic attitude to the baby that she had suspected was lying somewhere out on the land. ‘Did you think that it should get baptism? A Christian burial? The decency of a coffin and a consecrated grave?’

  After lunch Kathleen was dismissed and Joanne Hayes brought back. The doctor had sedated her again over the lunch hour. She spoke at times with eyes closed, her head propped against the microphone. Her voice slurred.

  At the end of the day the judge recommended that she receive further sedation to help her make it through the night. Her lawyers privately recommended that she should not go back to the farm. They asked that she be brought to Mary O’Riordan’s house, where her friend could keep an eye on her. They were afraid that Joanne Hayes would commit suicide. It was so done.

  The following morning, Mary O’Riordan remembers, Joanne came staggering into her bedroom, groggy and lost. Mary, her husband and Joanne had a good laugh about that. Then Mary brought Joanne to court, where she broke down again. Eventually Mary would not come to court any more. The phone calls she received in the middle of the night, anonymous, salacious and threatening, were too frightening.

  Other people came, however, to picket the court. Joanne Hayes had by then spent longer in the witness box than any other person in the history of the republic and had completed her testimony, but they wished to make their feelings clear. They wanted her and her family to know from whom the yellow flowers, telegrams, letters and mass cards that deluged them had come.

  16. Yellow Flowers

  The first yellow flower was sent by Bernie McCarthy of the Tralee women’s group, on Wednesday morning, 20 January at 11.15 am. She had come four miles into town from the country bungalow where she lived with her husband and three children. She was on her way to work, in Mahony’s bookshop on the main street. She stopped off at an arcade where Jean Murphy ran a flower stall. Her instructions to Jean were meticulous: a single yellow flower, wrapped in cellophane, to be delivered to Joanne Hayes at the urban-council building where the court was sitting, before the one-thirty national radio news if possible. She wrote out a card, wishing luck to Joanne.

  Later that morning two other women, expressing a similarly urgent desire, visited the florist.

  Joanne Hayes emerged from the building at 1 pm bearing three yellow roses. Detailed testimony verging on the sordid had just been wrenched from her. The squalor of that detail, broadcast on the national news to people who were eating lunch and sitting with their families, was thrown into stark relief by the announcement that ‘single yellow flowers’ had been sent to Ms Hayes by women who wished her well.

  The colour and the gesture gripped the imagination of listeners. Overnight, individually wrapped yellow flowers began to shower upon the woman impaled at the centre of the legal arena. It was not entirely spontaneous. A feminist network had fretted into action as Bernie McCarthy was making her way to the florist shop. A telephone call had gone from the Tralee women’s group to an Irish feminist publishing group in Dublin, which is housed in a building owned by the Irish Women Workers’ Union. Róisín Conroy passed on the request, during a lunch-break discussion, to the various groups of women working in the building. One group consisted of eighteen women on the second floor who were participating in a training programme. The women ranged in age from twenty to forty-four and had thirty-five children between them and were all unemployed.

  The price of a flower, less than two pounds, was just about manageable, and they all agreed to send one each. The request was passed up to the third floor, where another six women graduates of the first publishing course had set up their own Women’s Community Press. An invitation to join in was sent to the office where a further five female officials worked.

  Thirty roses were sent to Joanne Hayes. The order was placed with Interflora by Colette O’Neill, who had last attempted to directly influence the
course of Irish history in 1971 as one of a group of women who took what has since become known as the ‘Pill Train’ to Northern Ireland, whence she brought back banned contraceptives. In that part of the island which is under British occupation, women enjoy a measure of control over their fertility. On her return to Dublin, armed with illegal contraband, Colette had declared to television cameras that ‘The law is now obsolete.’ Fourteen years later, as she ordered flowers for Joanne Hayes, the same law was still, with minor modifications, in force.

  The telephone was then taken over by Sue Richardson of the Women’s Community Press. She suspended work on her book on drug abuse, Pure Murder, the first ever publication to expose in depth the nature of the problem in Ireland. She began to make calls and to inform incoming callers that yellow roses were being sent to Joanne Hayes. Many of those phoning in asked to be put on the list. They would bring the money in when next they came to the building.

  The situation called for trust. A hundred yellow roses had by now been ordered and the mainly poor women in the building would have to advance money for them. Their trust was not abused.

  Throughout that day and the next, individual women from the three floors contacted their own groups back home. Each group was asked to send a flower and pass the message on to at least one more person. Catherine McConville rang the Sligo women’s group which she had helped form only two years before. Scarcely had they come together than those women, hopeful, starry-eyed and in search of a brave new world, had come smack up against the pro-life campaign. Their nerve failed, as the nerve of so many women’s groups had failed, and they had remained silent about the proposed amendment to the constitution. They had barely stepped out into the world than they were slammed back behind closed doors, unable, as so few had been able, to bear the taunts and threats about women with murder in their hearts about the children in their wombs.

  The Sligo women’s group sent a shower of roses in response to the call from Catherine McConville.

  The message had initially been taken by her husband, Declan Bree, father of two and the unemployed Independent Socialist member of Sligo County Council. He phoned Anne Gilmartin, a member of Catherine’s group and also a member of the Labour Women’s National Council, and she took over. Meantime Declan went down to The Terraces, a working-class street where the treasurer of his party lived. Brenda French’s mother stood behind her at the front door. Both women gave him, at once, the price of two flowers. He spent the next couple of hours calling on people and collecting money.

  Then he went into the shop of florist Kitty Maclarrick. She went into the back room and he heard her start to give painstaking instructions, over the phone, to a florist in Tralee, miles away. He heard her pause. ‘Oh, you know all about it?’ he heard her say. The florist in Tralee, under siege, knew all about it.

  Declan called into a café. The woman behind the desk was excited. ‘Declan, there’s a great plan. You have to send a yellow flower, just the one, to Joanne Hayes.’ She had heard this from her brother’s girlfriend. Declan Bree had left his home just four hours earlier to spread news of the plan and now he was being told about it on his return journey through that small town.

  The Waterford resource centre received a call from Brigid Nevin, now working above in Dublin. Nadine Roche, who had worked for a time in Derry city, rang her former employers in the bookshop there. The Bookworm in turn rang another bookshop in Belfast. Galway had received a call from Sligo. Cork Quay Co-op and the Limerick Family Planning Centre were already saying ‘We know, we know.’ All of the women’s groups listed in the annual Irishwomen’s Guidebook and Diary were contacted.

  Those telephoned were instructed to keep the flowers going to whichever member of the family took the stand after Joanne. All of those calls and all of those women are not, however, sufficient to account for the number of single yellow flowers that arrived for the Hayes family. It would be wishful thinking to conclude that there are that many active feminists in Ireland.

  There were by now hundreds of flowers, bouquets, cards and letters arriving from all manner of people. Much of the correspondence was in the form of mass cards. People whose heart went out to Joanne Hayes were nonetheless bewildered by the moral complexity of her situation.

  17. Letters and Mass Cards

  In Kerry, in January 1984, two people proclaiming devotion to the catholic faith came to public notice. One was Kevin McNamara, an elderly celibate prince of the church who celebrated that month his promotion from bishop of Kerry to archbishop of Dublin. While he was being fêted, his parishioner Joanne Hayes, young, rural, unmarried, mother of one child, was being lacerated at the all-male tribunal.

  ‘The central issue in The Kerry Babies case’, said an editorial in the county newspaper, The Kingdom, ‘is one that is as old as time itself . . . Falling in love can never be sufficient justification for the wilful destruction of the marriage bond . . . Up to now nobody – neither churchman nor statesman nor layman – has had the moral courage to call the Tralee affair by its proper name . . . the bishops and the pastors ought to be providing clear and unequivocal guidance. They ought to speak now or forever hold their peace.’ Archbishop McNamara said nothing.

  The people of the ninety-five-per-cent Catholic country said a lot. Joanne Hayes received more than five hundred letters, cards and notes which invoked, on her behalf, the intercession of a loving compassionate God who was clearly and with certainty seen to be quite a cut above the human metronomes who clocked up her imperfections. Irish catholics, wanting genuinely to be good, struggling desperately under a yoke of bewildering rules and regulations, wrote to Joanne Hayes that no man should be allowed to sit in judgement on the human sexual condition.

  Her ordeal called forth a confessional outpouring from women and men who had also suffered massively. They told her about themselves in letters; they told each other; all over the country the most amazing confidences were brought out and shared.

  It was as though the great and fearful silence imposed by the amendment campaign was now being shattered as they called out that there were other truths that needed to be told, that it was all very well to revere and uphold the sanctity of life, but that life could break a person on the wheel and drive to very murder unless help was offered.

  Their letters were a perfect cacophony of misery, anger and solidarity, and subjection to a God who alone could cope with what went on down here. The catholics who wrote trusted God, not the priests nor the doctors nor the lawyers. As if to make the point more forcefully, one hundred and forty-two of the people who wrote to her enclosed mass cards, indicating that human judgement had been bypassed in favour of a direct line to their God.

  ‘The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will be offered for your intentions to implore God’s blessing’, read the inscriptions. Unusually, the printed cards, normally held to be sufficient statements in themselves, bore scribbled insertions. ‘No matter what you have done, any of us could have done the same in similar circumstances. Jesus loves you’, said one. Another said ‘I know you well now, with all I have read on the papers and seen on the telly. My heart goes out to you.’

  Joanne Hayes’s public suffering evoked memories of private ordeals and tribulations, striking chords in a population that had never been able to fully subscribe to the officially sanctioned norm. The letters showed that during her days on the stand people were literally sitting by their radios and televisions, confessing with her, hoping it would never happen to them, grieving that such personal matters should ever see the light of excruciating day.

  ‘I have just heard on the news at 12 noon that your daughter has broken down while giving evidence. Will you tell her not to answer any more questions. May God help her, poor child’, wrote a woman from County Cork. A Letterkenny lady wrote that ‘my TV was broken but I watched on a neighbour’s set. Your mother looks fed up and tired. If only she had your father’s support. But he is in heaven praying for you all.’ From Limerick came a card telling that ‘I have just read a report of
the questioning . . . it was the lowest, cruellest I have ever heard. I cried as I read it.’ From the heart of bourgeois Dublin came a letter saying ‘I cry as I think of how you are being hurt and I pray that Jesus will comfort you.’ A bleakly beautiful reproduction of Trees in the Snow by William Leech bore the hopeless, affectionate message ‘A wintry card for your wintry ordeal’. A Kilkenny woman declared that she would be down protesting, ‘only for the bad roads’.

  There was a sense of being trapped and helpless while Joanne Hayes was being legally crucified. A four-page letter told that the writer was snowed in, living on potatoes, out of cigarettes, and a mere two hundred yards from the nearest shop. ‘It would be too dangerous to venture out.’

  A signed Christmas card, full of incongruous good cheer and revelry, was sent by a policeman’s wife who explained desperately that it was the only one she could get in a hurry.

  The letters were shy and tactful, hoping she wouldn’t mind strangers intruding on her already destroyed privacy. ‘We hope you won’t be offended by us writing to you but we thought you might like to know that there are many who are appalled’, said one couple. A woman describing herself as a housewife and mother of three teenagers said, ‘I want you to know that a lot of women everywhere are outraged at the way you are being treated. Sometimes it helps to know that someone out there cares and that everyone is not against you. I remember you every morning at Mass and always remember that God’s love and mercy is greater than man’s law.’

  The letters sounded a resonant catholic response to Christ’s despairing cry ‘Will you not watch one hour with me.’ I stay awake at night; you are the last person I think of each night; my mother has been sending me reports of the tribunal; my thoughts are with you day and night; I have just heard on the Irish station in New York . . .

 

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