A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  One Dublin family wrote to her several times, saying initially that the hurt she had suffered rendered them speechless, then that they were still too hurt and angry to say anything more, then sending her a Mass card, finally a card announcing that a whole series of Masses had been procured on her behalf.

  Though commending her into God’s hands, her correspondents were nevertheless thoughtful, argumentative and frank about her earthly situation. ‘I am a married man with a lovely family and I love children as you do. We do not agree with sex outside marriage but God loves you.’

  After having four children and finding herself pregnant again, she was ‘too browned off’ to go to a doctor and delayed seeking medical help until she was seven months pregnant, wrote one woman. She understood how hard it was in Joanne’s case, ‘the way things were for you’.

  If she had ever intended hurting her baby she would have done so ‘during the early stages’, said another, referring discreetly to abortion. ‘I believe things went wrong for you in the end . . . God loves you, regardless of the outcome.’

  A signed note told that ‘Life is very difficult and people make it harder for us. I had a hard life with a drunken gambling husband. I took a nervous breakdown and I am here in Donegal with my 86-year-old uncle. This last two and a half years I feel lonely. I wish I never got married. My God we women suffer through life, also the little girl in Granard last year, only a child.’ A married woman in the midlands said she had only lately begun to understand her husband’s favourite saying that ‘an erect penis has no conscience. How I would love to make young girls understand that just because a man wants to go to bed with them does not mean that he loves them. Too, too late so many of us have brokenheartedly learnt that. We are inclined to condemn the male instinct and yet both instincts are God given and therefore right. ’Tis what we sometimes do with them that brings trouble. I also pray for Jer Locke and his family. What a start to a marriage which as you know Mrs Hayes is never easy anyway, however worthwhile. Poor Johanna, how often the woman is made feel guilty and yet we are all individuals with free will. Before the Christ who died for me I cannot blame anyone else for what I’ve done and before Christ the man cannot try to blame the woman, even though from Adam it is tried.’

  Two single mothers wrote a joint letter. ‘Thousands of girls go to England for abortions and of those who freely admit it not one is subjected to the least bit of criticism. Enclosed is a cardigan for Yvonne. It should fit until she’s two and a half.’ He had left Kerry in the fifties, wrote an elderly man, fallen in love with the wrong person, ‘and am now paying the penalty for my mistakes and probably will for the rest of my life. It involves divorce, abortion and other tragedies. I know your home village very well, and the surrounding villages, Lixnaw, Kilflynn and Tralee. May God help you, you deserve a break.’

  A Kilkenny women said ‘My little girl is just four. She knows you on the paper and TV and she wonders about the babies. I am an unwed mum too. May God guide you on the right road. All I can do is pray for all concerned.’

  A former IRA man from Galway wrote that he had contacted a former IRA woman in Dublin, ‘asking her to organise the young women of Dublin, as she did in the twenties. I was happy and proud when I saw on the television what those Kerry women did outside the tribunal.’

  A County Cork woman recommended prayer to Padre Pio. ‘I had been suffering from lumps on both breasts for 2 years, going in and out of hospital monthly. The specialist told me the lumps had taken a turn and I should have both breasts removed right away. Well, Joanne, only for St Martin and Padre Pio I’d be gone queer in the head. Now I have a clot as well under my right arm. I know these are very different circumstances to you, but God only knows what I went through and St Martin and Padre Pio helped me, when I could cry at a minute’s notice. Forgive me for writing but I hope one day you’ll be the happiest person in the whole world. The wheels don’t ever stop turning, and St Martin and Padre Pio won’t let you down.’

  She had a marvellous husband who wasn’t in the least worried about her past, wrote a woman who hoped that Joanne would be similarly blessed. She recommended psalm 139, ‘O Lord, you search me and know me’. A mother whose teenage daughter had been killed in a car crash said that she often went to the foot of the Blessed Virgin in the church and prayed for strength. ‘Joanne, you pray too to your little boy in Heaven. But for the narrow minded people of Ireland, holy Ireland at that, your little boy would be alive today, as you wouldn’t be afraid of being a mother.’

  Whether she gave birth inside or outside the house, ‘God bless you. You made a mistake. Don’t do so again’, wrote a Clare woman. No matter what she had done, any of us could have done the same in similar circumstances, a correspondent underlined every scribbled word in the mass card. Several urged, in kindly tones, the use of contraception. If the tribunal could prove that a woman could have twins by two different men, one twin obviously born some time after the other, she would eat her typewriter, a woman threatened.

  ‘I used to feel that you must be very hard to neglect your baby, in the pregnancy and birth, but now I understand your actions more clearly I think. It seems to me that when you realised things weren’t going to work out you just stopped thinking about your pregnancy as a baby’, a stranger wrote.

  ‘If the baby was born in the house don’t be afraid to say it. Our Lady will help you’, came a letter from a nurse. A mother said, ‘If I can console you at all with a bit of information relating to the birth of my first child in hospital, the nurse pulled the cord and it broke before the afterbirth was delivered.’

  Who did what, or where, inside or outside the house, was not important, came a signed letter from a family that was praying for her. A bunch of neighbours from a street in Cork told her she was ‘God’s child, and should you have erred what harm. We all do at some time in our lives. Not one of us would know what way we would react if we were placed in a similar position.’

  A woman from Donegal asked for help in dealing with ‘my husband – my beast’. She wrote several times, each letter unfolding a chapter of misery. A doctor wrote from a psychiatric hospital where he had signed himself in to get away from his wife. ‘You are paying the price of reform for all of us. Thank you. God bless you all’, said a well-wisher.

  There was an astonishing amount of correspondence from nuns. One said ‘Tell the truth anyway, Joanne, no matter what. I thank God that the Lord is our judge and he judges the heart, not the actions. That’s where he differs from the human judges – they can only judge actions, which leaves a lot to be desired. Be strong. We are backing you with much prayer these days.’

  A nun wrote from a Kildare convent that ‘I’m suffering terribly myself, Joanne. I’ve been sinful sexually and I’m so proud before God to be one of his forgiven sinners. I am a woman. I pain for you. I pray for you. I understand you. You have suffered so much – a mother losing a baby, a lover paining with pain for the man you loved, the probable pain of guilt and shame, the bodily pain of birth, the public scorn and misunderstanding, the spiritual nameless suffering of going against social mores. Love from your sister in suffering.’

  A nun on spiritual retreat told her that the priest directing the retreat had asked for prayers for the Hayes family. A nun travelled to Tralee to present a card signed by all the sisters in her Dublin convent.

  Group support was expressed in telegrams by the Ennis soroptimist club; the women’s department of Sinn Féin; the female attendants of St Fintan’s hospital, Portlaoise; Family Aid; the principal and staff of Dunlavin national school; the ladies’ club, Dundalk; the Dublin inner-city project; workers in a Galway office; thirty-one villagers from Maam Cross, County Galway; the staff of AFRI, a third world organisation; female telephonists in the Galway exchange; the staff and managing director of Unisex hair salon in County Kildare; sixteen teachers from Killester Vocational School, Dublin; the Connolly Youth Movement; the Kilrush Tenants’ Association, County Clare; the Limerick office staff of the Irish Transp
ort and General Workers’ Union; the NUJ chapel of City Limits magazine, London; the Galway civil rights group; a self-help women’s group in Cork; and the Labour women’s national council.

  18. Abbeydorney Comes to Town

  Long before the tribunal began, the signpost to Abbeydorney was daubed with graffiti. Rivulets of paint ran down from the letters of the superimposed word so that ‘Sex’ dribbled straight into ‘Abbeydorney’. The rural villages of small-town Ireland had been invisibly tarred with the same brush since the novel Valley of the Squinting Windows was published in 1918. It told a story of gossip, scandal and silence and it became the bible of outsiders who wondered what went on in small communities.

  The graffito has since been removed from the signpost. The novel is now considered an outdated document. Abbeydorney changed everything when it came marching into Tralee in support of Joanne Hayes. Those who saw the villagers standing silently with placards outside the court sensed the turning of a page of history.

  The idea of protesting came to John Barrett when he read an account of the tribunal in the Irish Press. The paper quoted a farmer from Rathmore on the county border who had been sent into court by his neighbours to see for himself what was going on and report back. Rathmore has not forgotten the mentally retarded man who was convicted of a sex-murder on the evidence of a policeman who hid under his bed and claimed to have overheard an incriminating conversation. The Rathmore farmer was so incensed by the tribunal and by the sedation of Joanne Hayes, which he had witnessed, that he was going home to get ‘the pike out of the thatch’. The phrase is honoured code for rural rebellion.

  John Barrett is a man of standing in Abbeydorney. His father had captained the football team which brought the all-Ireland Sam Maguire cup to Kerry for the first time. As a former sub-editor on a national newspaper and now contributor of a sports column to Kerry’s Eye, John Barrett had a shrewd nose for newsmaking.

  He telephoned Jerome Donovan, the enormously popular village butcher who had stood bail for Joanne Hayes in the sum of five thousand pounds when she was first arrested. He had also promised to meet the family’s legal bill, should the case ever come to trial, sharing costs with their cousin Paudie Fuller, a Fianna Fáil councillor.

  No one in Abbeydorney thought the charges would ever be sustained in court. Now they were witnessing a trial within a tribunal. Between them, John Barrett and Jerome Donovan rang every villager and farmer within the parish who had a telephone. Within two hours of that Tuesday afternoon’s work they were confident enough to place an order with the publishers of Kerry’s Eye for the immediate printing of streamers that said ‘Abbeydorney supports Joanne’.

  Some of the villagers went into Tralee at an early hour on Wednesday morning to pick up the streamers and staple them onto cardboard placards. The farmers came as soon as they had done their milking. They were all on the picket line by nine o’clock. The frost hadn’t melted off the roads and the tribunal was not due to start until ten o’clock.

  Newspapers that morning had given a front-page lead to criticism of the tribunal by the national parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights. While John Barrett and Jerome Donovan had been telephoning neighbours, the TDs (members of parliament) had been telling each other in committee that it was time for the minister for justice, Michael Noonan, to intervene in the tribunal. They described the cross-examination as ‘insensitive’, ‘very, very frightening’, ‘harrowing and quite horrific’ and ‘shameful’.

  The tribunal, said the all-party committee, showed an attitude to women’s sexuality that needed to be examined. People involved in counselling rape victims had indicated to them that the ‘interrogation’ of rape victims was similar. The ‘manner and matter, tone and tenor’ of the tribunal ‘would fundamentally affect people’s attitudes to women’.

  The Abbeydorney villagers said nothing; their presence said everything to the world’s media who had come to televise them. After two hours of walking silently up and down, they went into the council building and stood around the walls of the packed court. Kathleen Hayes was on the stand.

  In a room set specially aside for members of the family Joanne Hayes sat with her daughter Yvonne and brother Ned. The villagers came in to see them and were introduced to workers from the sports complex who had also come to keep vigil.

  Cups of tea were taken in an atmosphere of strained courtesy as town and country met. Yvonne became the focus of a conversation that never once took account of the legal horror next door. When Kathleen came off the stand and a lunch break was called, the villagers went home as quietly and purposefully as they had come. The valley of the squinting windows was no more.

  19. Protest

  The Abbeydorney demonstration was followed next day by a feminist demonstration that drew participants from all over the country. Dawn streaked the sky as women shivered outside a city-centre Dublin store that had bowed to the recession and closed. The women had one thing in common – financial poverty. They were full-time mothers, or unemployed radicals, or graduates on the dole.

  Kate Shanahan, who had co-ordinated the trip from the women’s centre in Dame Street, thought that between them the fifty-four women could cobble together the £225 it cost to hire the bus they now waited for. Her own group, Women for Disarmament, had contributed forty pounds and was sponsoring three travellers. The bus didn’t come.

  When offices opened for business at 9 am she began to ring bus-hire firms. The women were tired, hungry and irritable and they hadn’t even begun the two-hundred-mile journey yet. They had come into the city from the outlying suburbs of Tallaght, Clondalkin and Ballymun, or from flatland, and most of them had been up since 6 am, preparing food for children whom they would leave behind with husbands or friends, making sandwiches for their own journey, going out then into the streets in winter pitch darkness to catch an early bus or share a taxi.

  At ten o’clock a coach was procured from CIÉ (the public-transport system) at a cost of £320, one hundred pounds more than anticipated. As it moved out of the city, coins and notes were collected and still they were thirty pounds short.

  There was only one woman on that coach in possession of a cheque book and she stopped at a rural town to draw out sufficient money to make up the difference, on the understanding that it would some day be repaid into her overstretched account after someone had organised a fund-raising event. Weeks later this was done.

  At Newbridge, County Kildare, they picked up three women who had waited faithfully in the certain knowledge that the women’s bus would turn up some time. In Portlaoise at noon, three hours behind schedule, they picked up a woman who had waited outside the prison all morning. Patricia Bennet had kidney trouble but she had not dared, during all that time, to leave the designated rendezvous and go in search of a toilet. Portlaoise prison houses the country’s political prisoners and the police and army had viewed with alarm the solitary woman opposite their main gates who kept peering anxiously up the main road to Dublin. They had several times asked her to move on. She cheered, and the women cheered, as the bus finally pulled in. Apart from that communal outbreak of emotional solidarity, though, the passengers kept quietly to their own groups of friends.

  ‘There was no singing, no political oratory, no sloganeering on the way to Tralee,’ says Kate Shanahan. The passengers were drawn from all political groups and from none, from Sinn Féin, Revolutionary Struggle, the Socialist Workers’ Movement and Liberation for Irish Lesbians to the women of KLEAR who are teaching themselves how to read and write and who were on their first-ever demonstration.

  ‘There was no effort at a quick teach-in. There was no need. We had one thing in common and that was that we were women. It was the only thing we had in common. It was more than enough. That bus was fuelled by anger. You could feel it. It was a speechless anger and it was sad and no analysis that any political section could offer would have been big enough to encompass it.’ Joanne Hayes, they felt, had undergone agonising scrutiny simply because she was a woman. T
he perfect excuse had been found to pin a woman under the microscope and have a good look at her. She had been charged with no crime, but womanhood itself was on trial in Tralee.

  When the bus arrived in Tralee, there were already hundreds of women and quite a few men parading in front of the council buildings. Kate Shanahan was as surprised as Marguerite Egan was delighted. This demonstration was unlike any other demonstration that seasoned feminists had attended. ‘There were ordinary people in it!’ says Marguerite Egan.

  Their own mothers were out there with them. Kate’s mother, who lives in Tralee, was waiting for the Dubliners with that most traditionally motherly of sights, an armful of food. ‘She had used four sliced pans to make sandwiches, including vegetarian sandwiches, for she knew that some of my friends didn’t eat meat. I had thought that she might bring me a snack and then disappear after saying hello to me, but she came on the demo with us and she said her heart soared when she saw us pouring out of the bus. She thought that only a few of us would have bothered when it came to the crunch, and that’s why she only used four sliced pans.’

  There were matrons from Castlemaine, complete with banner, neighbouring women from Abbeydorney, a busload of women from Cork, a carload from Belfast and hundreds from Tralee itself. ‘When Joanne came out of the building we were awestruck. The size of her struck everybody. We couldn’t believe she was so small,’ says Kate Shanahan. ‘And then her mother came out. That nearly wrecked us. She looked so ordinary. She looked like a, like a . . . mother. And we stared at them for a while, all of us raving feminists, and these ordinary shy country people, and we had come all the way to support them and now we didn’t want to intrude. There was this gulf between us, between our experience and theirs, our beliefs and theirs, just a big gulf and we wanted to reach across it and say we’re all ordinary. We didn’t. We didn’t know how to do it, what would be the right gesture.’