A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  An old woman stepped out of the crowd which lined the footpath and went right up and hugged Mary Hayes. ‘It felt great. It looked right. One old woman hugging another.’ The younger women held back from reaching out to Joanne. ‘There was this big sense that we didn’t wanted to intrude. Her privacy had been invaded enough. So we just looked at her, like fools, and held out our flowers and cards to her, and she couldn’t take them. Her arms were already full of them. We loaded up Kathleen, she was a bit overcome by it all, crying and smiling, and then Ned and Mike.’

  The Hayeses disappeared into the hotel opposite and then the lawyers came out. ‘A woman behind me was yelling “Bastard” at this man in a suit and someone pointed out that it was Joanne’s solicitor Patrick Mann. It was just one man in a suit after another, and then came the judge in his suit. We lined up and booed him. He had this little smile on his face.’

  When the building had emptied and there seemed nothing else to do – all that journeying from all over Ireland to speak their minds and show their feelings, and now it was over inside half an hour – the pent-up energy was suddenly released in the direction of the police station, just down the road.

  ‘A crowd gathers its own momentum,’ says Kate Shanahan. ‘Next thing we knew we were outside the barracks and you could tell the non-political people. They were the ones with the bemused looks on their faces.’ One incident on the way there had cheered her up. An elderly countryman in a dark-blue serge suit had danced in rage up to the two young men in the forefront of the procession and said, ‘Let the women out in front. It’s their day.’ She wondered if Ireland would ever be the same again.

  Outside the station a woman from Revolutionary Struggle started chanting through a loud hailer ‘Kennedy, Courtney, both start shaking, today’s pigs are tomorrow’s bacon’. The crowd started drifting off to a pub which had been hired for the night and some women went back to the hotel for the scheduled press conference.

  There were only four reporters there. The other journalists had caught the evening train to Dublin. Miriam Killeny was glad of their absence. The representative of Cherish, the first group ever formed in the country to fight specifically for the rights of unmarried mothers, had failed to arrive in Tralee. She had been plucked out of the crowd to read a statement on its behalf. ‘Someone came racing along asking for a single mother, any single mother, to speak for Cherish.’

  After the conference Miriam went downstairs to the bar. ‘The Hayes family were sitting at a table on their own. The whole thing looked odd. We had come from all over to support them and now we couldn’t even speak to each other. We were constantly held back by a sense of not wanting to intrude, but if we didn’t go over it might look as though we were using them, as though they were a handy peg on which to hang the feminist cause.’

  Two women eventually approached the family and Mary Hayes said they were grand to have come all that way to Tralee in that weather. The gulf was bridged.

  ‘Mary Hayes would leave a lump in your throat. Her sons and daughter were around her, still full of youth, but there she was, on in years, up to her neck in trouble when she should have been looking forward to retirement, just like my own mother,’ says Kate Shanahan. ‘And then you’d think of your own mother. If any one of us were put on public exhibition, what family would come through unblemished? You’d look at Mary Hayes and know that every mother in the country had escaped trauma by a wing and a prayer. She was the one that got picked out. Going back on the bus that night I bet every woman was thinking of her own mother, and how close we all are to disaster if the public should be given a look in at us.’

  The women arrived back in Dublin at three in the morning. The conductor left them as near to their homes as he could. In the middle of the night they set off in pairs and threes, to hitch and walk, those who lived far away benefiting from yet another collection of shillings to get a taxi home.

  When the tribunal resumed the following Monday, Justice Kevin Lynch spoke his mind on the scenes of the previous week.

  20. Scramble to the Hospital

  I

  On Monday morning, 28 January, Judge Kevin Lynch opened up proceedings with a bombastic attempt to assert authority over a tribunal that seemed to the public to have gone out of control. Parliamentarians had been freely critical, the villagers of Abbeydorney had marched on him, feminists had surrounded him and the police into whose behaviour he had been enquiring had been photographed offering him protection.

  The judge described the women as ‘raucous, ignorant urban dwellers’ and he threatened jail sentence on anyone who, in his opinion, insulted or obstructed the tribunal. He personally would impose the sentence, up to a maximum of two years, and he personally would decide if the person who committed contempt and subsequently sought release from jail were sincerely and sufficiently apologetic, and he would be in no personal hurry to hear apologies, since he was a busy man.

  The public did not know what they were talking about, he said. They had not seen the files, which he described as ‘the founts of wisdom and knowledge’. (He was referring to files such as those written by Detective Sergeant P.J. Browne, who had said ‘This is the sad story of a woman scorned . . .’)

  The judge then remarked to Dermot McCarthy that he had seen, over the weekend, a newspaper photograph of Bridie Fuller sitting at home with her family. When did she propose to appear before the tribunal? Mr McCarthy promised to look into the matter.

  That afternoon Bridie Fuller was removed to hospital, suffering from a second stroke. The court was not told, nor was any sick certificate produced. On Wednesday morning, 30 January, the judge returned to the subject again. He had heard, he said, that Bridie Fuller was now in hospital.

  Mr McCarthy agreed.

  He was sure, said the judge, that Mr McCarthy was most anxious that Miss Fuller should give evidence.

  Mr McCarthy agreed.

  He understood, said the judge, that when Miss Fuller had been similarly indisposed before, she had merely found difficulty in walking, but that her intellect was unaffected.

  The two men discussed whether some day Bridie Fuller might be able to negotiate the front steps of this or any other court venue. They agreed it would be exceedingly difficult. The judge revealed that he had, unknown to anybody else, personally checked the back entrance to the court. Although the services of his tipstaff were available to him, and those of his legal team, and indeed those of any doctor in the land, this high court judge had taken upon himself the humble and secret task of walking up and down the back stairwell of the court, trying to figure out if an old, ill and halt woman could somehow be hauled up its narrow length and brought before him.

  He had figured out that this couldn’t be done either, the judge informed Mr McCarthy. He then broke the stalemated silence with a rush of words. He was adjourning at once, immediately and without delay to the hospital, and the lawyers, guards, journalists and public could join him there. Judge Lynch rose and was gone. There followed the kind of scene which he had warned against on Monday, when he had said ‘This tribunal shall not be insulted’. In the mad scramble to get to the hospital, the tribunal insulted itself, as startled lawyers ran, walked and tumbled out of the courthouse, to stand on the steps and ask ‘Which hospital, where, when, how shall we get there?’ Tralee had three hospitals, the old and the new and the home for the elderly. A television crew were well on the road to Killarney, where Bridie had previously stayed, before caution persuaded them to come back and at least check out her home town.

  Taxis were commandeered, passing motorists were begged for lifts, cars were dangerously packed with strangers who had abandoned all pretence at legal dignity in the scramble to get to God knows where in a town with which they were unfamiliar.

  One journalist seized the opportunity to get into a cab and issue the immortal line, ‘Follow that judge.’

  Two feminists set off on one man’s borrowed bike.

  At the hospital the rudely healthy visitors were packed into a teachin
g annexe. Nurses came across the lawn with trays of water and glasses. Uneasy jokes were cracked about ‘Scotch and ice’. Would Bridie testify from an oxygen tent, surpassing the spectacle of Joanne Hayes testifying under sedation?

  The judge came in and sat down and Dermot McCarthy admitted for the first time that he was representing a woman he had not met. ‘I have not had an opportunity to have consultations with her.’ Consultant physician Robert McEneaney took the oath and told the assembly that Bridie Fuller was paralysed and brain-damaged and totally unable to testify. The tribunal proceeded to establish just what kind of brain damage Bridie had. ‘There are different types of brain damage,’ said Martin Kennedy. ‘There is brain-damage which renders one less capable of intellectual capacity and brain damage which does not.’

  Bridie Fuller had both, they were told. Her comprehension was quite good, but her ability to express ideas was impaired, as was her ability to speak.

  ‘A person with a stammer may have difficulty in speaking, but no difficulty in formulating ideas.’ Martin Kennedy seized on the notion that Bridie could think, whatever her little difficulty about expressing those thoughts. The spectre arose of a tribunal conducted through sign language.

  Bridie had difficulty even in formulating ideas, he was told. Anthony Kennedy wanted to know if alcohol was a factor. The spectre arose of Bridie Fuller skulking in the hospital with a hangover.

  Alcohol was not a factor in her condition, he was assured. ‘Do you think she would be in a position to understand legal advice?’ asked Mr McCarthy.

  ‘No,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Would she be able to receive advice sufficiently to make a will?’ asked the judge.

  ‘Possibly, yes,’ said the doctor.

  The only problem really about giving advice, summed up the judge, was the physical problem of talking and that might be resolved as Ms Fuller’s health improved. ‘We do not need to have her capable of walking.’

  Turning to Mr McCarthy he warned ‘Insofar as receiving instructions is concerned, this is the middle of the fourth week we are in Tralee and she has been out and about during that time and there is going to be no delay once I get word that this lady is fit . . .’

  The tribunal made its way back to Tralee. There was humiliation in the air.

  II

  Bridie Fuller was not a talkative person. Since her premature retirement in 1969, when she was fifty-four years old, she had withdrawn gradually into a world of her own, sleeping by day, sitting wakefully by the range in the kitchen all through the night. After giving up her car, due to what her loyal family resolutely refused to call a drink problem, she withdrew even more from the real world of other people.

  To outsiders, she appeared strange, even neglected. The peace commissioner before whom she was brought in the special court in the garda station said she looked as though she hadn’t been washed since Christmas. To family and friends, she was a woman who commanded, when in the full of her health, massive respect, and who was given, as her mind and body declined, deep affection. They accepted her as she was and chose not to disturb her.

  Not an eyebrow was raised when Bridie turned up once at the funeral of a former nursing colleague, in a state of disarray. She joined the guard of honour wearing her old uniform. She had put the uniform on over her civilian clothes, which hung down below the hem. A tattered cardigan, pulled on over the lot, completed the ensemble.

  Those who saw her that day remembered the military precision that Bridie had brought from her career in the British army to civilian nursing in Tralee. If the working day began at nine in the morning, Bridie used to arrive in hospital at twenty minutes before the hour.

  She would take off her coat, fold her nursing cardigan over her arm, light a cigarette and sit up straight in her chair as she smoked. All around her other nurses would be slumped in chairs, unwilling to move until the hands of the clock should meet on the hour. Bridie got to her feet at ten to nine, put out her cigarette and reported early for duty.

  Now, here she was, retired and bedraggled at the guard of honour. Her colleagues were still honoured to have her. Sister Aquinas tried once in a while to comb Bridie’s hair, one elderly sister tending another, and accepted the irritated rebuff without rancour. Then they would sit together by the range, silently, Bridie responding to the simple questions put to her: had she slept well, was she eating? Bridie was famous in Abbeydorney for only ever volunteering one piece of conversation. ‘What time is it?’ she would ask. On being told, she would lapse again into silence.

  She did not read newspapers, or listen to the radio or watch the television. She could not make a cup of tea.

  In the police station, on 1 May, she had sat from twelve noon until ten at night, saying virtually nothing, responding as best she could to the polite chit-chat manufactured by the guards who came to sit with her throughout the day. She did not know that Joanne was pregnant, she answered their repeated questions.

  Then Joanne was brought down to see her.

  The guards acknowledge that Joanne was in tears. They record that Joanne said to Bridie: ‘I was talking to Liam Moloney and I told him the truth.’

  Joanne Hayes had told Liam Moloney that she gave birth in the field. Liam Moloney acknowledges that he forgot to get her to sign that statement. When he brought it to her for signature after she had confessed to murdering the Cahirciveen baby, she had tapped the paper with her hand, he said, and declared ‘This is the truth.’ Now, however, in the garda station she said to Bridie, ‘You were in the room, Bridie. I told them.’ Bridie would not have been released from the station unless she implicated herself, was how Joanne Hayes later explained these words.

  Bridie made a statement saying she had delivered the child in the farmhouse.

  Bridie Fuller never retracted that statement and never accused the guards of pressurising her in any way to make it. When the family went to see their solicitor Patrick Mann to explain what had happened to them, Bridie sat in a silence that was occasionally broken by a mumble. ‘I got the impression,’ he said later, ‘that if you told Bridie the cow jumped over the moon, Bridie would repeat that the cow jumped over the moon.’

  Bridie did once refer to the matter, during the summer, when Sister Aquinas came to visit her. She was looking upset and the nun asked her ‘What’s the matter, Bridie, were you involved?’ Sister Aquinas was talking about the birth of Joanne’s baby, the circumstances of which were still unclear to her. ‘No,’ said Bridie, ‘but I changed my statement. I thought it would help Joanne.’ The nun said nothing. She did not want to upset Bridie further, she said. Besides which, she herself was upset.

  Bridie had also raised the topic with her old nursing colleague, Kathleen Ferry, who came to look after her during the days when the family was attending the tribunal. She said to Ms Ferry, ‘I want to tell you what happened.’ Ms Ferry said ‘Don’t be upsetting yourself, Bridie, don’t bother your head about all that.’ After a few minutes Bridie raised her head and asked, ‘What time is it?’

  When the charges were dropped in October 1984, Bridie Fuller was in hospital with a stroke. The internal police inquiry was unable to take a statement from her, but that did not matter, since the police were interested mainly in how the family had come to confess to stabbing the Cahirciveen baby, and Bridie had not implicated herself in that.

  Bridie spent the winter in three hospitals, in Cork, Killarney and Tralee. When she recovered mobility, she was sent home. She was under strict instructions to continue taking tablets for the high blood pressure that was starving her brain of oxygen. Between Christmas and the opening of the tribunal in Tralee, on 7 January, a leading criminal lawyer received a phone call from Patrick Mann asking him to represent the family. The lawyer was given to understand that he would not be able to talk to all the family before the proceedings opened. One of them was incoherent. The lawyer declined to represent a family whose full story he did not know.

  Bridie did not come to the tribunal. Her family felt that she woul
d never be well enough to come. Joanne and Kathleen discussed with Patrick Mann the necessity of getting a sick certificate that would excuse her. A physician in Tralee hospital, whom Patrick Mann recommended, said that if Bridie was reasonably well in body, she could only be excused by a psychiatrist, which he was not, and he refused to examine her.

  The family doctor, Liam Hayes, who had never noticed that Joanne was pregnant, had by now left Tralee to practise elsewhere. Joanne told Patrick Mann that she did not feel like asking Dr Hayes’s partner Dr Daly to come and see Bridie. Her previous experience of asking him for help and being told that he might involve the police had soured her.

  Dr Francis Chute, a general practitioner, agreed to go out to the farmhouse to see her. Bridie was by then refusing to take her tablets. He cajoled her into resumption of medication by talking about the old times they had spent together in hospital, twenty years ago. He did not medically examine her. He rang Patrick Mann that evening and told him that, as he was not Bridie’s family doctor and had not examined her, he was unable to issue a certificate excusing attendance at the tribunal.

  The family could not afford a psychiatrist and her lawyers, operating on a shoestring, did not hire one.

  The tribunal sat from 7 January until 28 January, with no sign of Bridie Fuller and no medical certificate to excuse her. None of her three legal representatives – Patrick Mann, Brian Curtin, junior counsel, and Dermot McCarthy, senior counsel – had been to see her. Officially, therefore, they were representing a woman whose version of events was a direct contradiction of that offered by their other clients, her relatives. For all they knew, she might stick by her statement to the police. That statement was part of the judge’s fount of wisdom and knowledge. Unlike the public, he was obliged to keep an open mind. The missing witness, as he had demonstrated by his dash to the hospital, was preying on it.