Professor Robert Harrison dismissed Mr Creedon’s painstaking calculations as speculation. It was not possible to tell by looking at a woman’s size that she was expecting twins. As for posture and military bearing, ‘some women are earth-mother types, who strut and waddle, others retain their femininity’.
Abandoning this method of deciding whether or not Joanne Hayes had had twins – by anybody – and still waiting, as the months went by, for the superfecundation expert to arrive from England, the tribunal considered whether superfecundation was the key at all. Supposing Joanne Hayes had had twins by Jeremiah Locke, both parents blood-group O, and both babies blood-group O? All the tribunal had to establish was that the Cahirciveen baby was never blood-group A in the first place. Dr Gilsenan was brought along to prove this. (Before dealing with the blood, he dealt with the baby’s wounds. His tests had shown that the knife found in the Hayes household could have caused them, although Dr Harbison’s tests had shown that the knife could not have done so.)
Dr Gilsenan suggested that a sample of the Cahirciveen baby’s lung tissue, which had been used for blood-grouping purposes, was contaminated. Therefore the A-grouping could be wrong. He had not examined this sample for contamination, mind you. He had examined another sample altogether, from the baby’s other lung, ‘and it would be most unreasonable to assume the contamination in one could be different to that in the other’.
After Dr Gilsenan, an expert from England flew in to say that contamination could not change blood-group A to blood-group O. However, immersion could. So yet another expert was flown in to say he had done blood tests on two halves of the same female corpse, each half pulled out of the Thames at two different times. The top half gave one blood group reading, the bottom half gave a different one entirely.
The only way you could be sure with any sample, said this expert, was to do repeated tests. The woman who had originally identified the Cahirciveen baby as group A, Dr Louise McKenna, was recalled to the tribunal. She announced that she had done four tests and then asked the paternity tester of Northern Ireland to check her results. The paternity tester was brought down from Belfast to affirm this and the English expert flew home. The Cahirciveen baby was blood-group A.
This left them with a superfecundation situation.
While awaiting the superfecundation expert the police lawyers filled in the time with evidence culled from research of their own. Martin Kennedy had been furnished with data from a German doctor who claimed to have established that out of ten thousand sets of twins born in his hospital, one hundred sets had been conceived by two different fathers. An incidence of one per cent! ‘If he means that he finds that sort of incidence of superfecundation in his hospital, it surprises me,’ said Professor Harrison. ‘Is it published?’
‘I asked him that,’ said Mr Kennedy, ‘and he said nobody wants to know.’ Anthony Kennedy was relying on a published work called Williams on Obstetrics. ‘Would you accept,’ he asked Mr Creedon, ‘that Williams on Obstetrics is an absolutely standard work?’
‘I don’t know that one,’ said Mr Creedon.
‘It is,’ said Mr Kennedy, ‘a recognised authoritative work. It is the garda síochána [police] guide for everyday problems to be solved, by instant reference to that authority. Have you never heard of it? Can it be true you never heard of Williams on Obstetrics?’ Mr Creedon had not. Professor Robert Harrison had: ‘It is a post-graduate textbook. It is not important.’
Mr Kennedy produced a cutting from the Daily Mirror, which he wanted Professor Harrison to consider. ‘Unfortunately’ it did not have a page-three picture, said Mr Kennedy, to the guffaws of his colleagues. What it did have was a story on a West German half-caste woman who had had twins, one black and one white. She claimed that the twins were conceived of two men, one a white German, the other a black American soldier. This, said Mr Anthony Kennedy, was evidence of superfecundation.
That, said the professor, was a 1978 publication based on a 1962 event. The Daily Mirror was late with its news. The judge intervened to query the story. He did not question its veracity, merely the character of the woman concerned. ‘What sort of ladies are we dealing with here?’ For the first time in months, the men of the tribunal were brought to realise that they had been speculating on the character of Joanne Hayes when they bandied about stories of women who slept around.
Psychiatrists were brought in to give opinions on her character.
24. What Sort of Lady?
Detective Sergeant Dillon, who had brought the police from Cahirciveen to Tralee to investigate Joanne Hayes as a suspect for the murder of the Cahirciveen baby, had very definite ideas about her character. ‘I knew her to salute going in and out of the sports centre. She was not a person that would return a salute, you know, and sometimes I would look for armbands for swimming and she always gave me the impression that I was disturbing her.’
After receiving her name from his hospital informant, he went to Abbeydorney to check her out: ‘I was in an unmarked car with Detective Sergeant O’Donnell and we were driving past the Hayes home and I saw Joanne on a roadway wheeling her pram. She was definitely watching the car to see who was in it when we came along. As we were coming up to her, she was looking at the car to see who was in it and when we came face to face with her she put her eyes down to the ground.’
The tribunal heard many reasons why a woman couldn’t look a man in the eye. ‘These are things nobody wants to talk about,’ Professor Harrison pointed out. In one English hospital alone it was found that twenty-one per cent of the men coming deludedly into the maternity ward to see their offspring were not the fathers at all.
The professor, practising in Dublin’s most famous maternity hospital, the Rotunda, no longer asked questions in front of prospective fathers. ‘I wouldn’t ask the woman in the presence of her husband and I wouldn’t write the reply down.’
Although it was medically possible to disprove paternity, it was impossible to prove it. ‘You can never say somebody is the father.’ That knowledge a woman could carry with her to the grave. No man can know. He can only trust.
Dr John Fennelly, chief psychiatrist in Limerick mental hospital, met Joanne Hayes in jail after Detective Dillon had arrested her and charged her with the murder of the Cahirciveen baby. He found her ill, depressed and suicidal and had her transferred immediately to his hospital. She insisted that she was not the mother of the Cahirciveen baby and recovered swiftly when her own baby was found. She spoke often and lovingly of Jeremiah Locke, the father of her dead child.
Martin Kennedy came straight to the point. ‘Did she love this man or love what this man or some other man was prepared to do with her?’ Pursuing his thesis on the sort of lady the tribunal was dealing with, to paraphrase the judge, Mr Kennedy explained that if he could show that Joanne Hayes was ‘interested in sexual activity for its own sake, and not for the sake of loving a particular man’, he would be well on the road to establishing superfecundation. All he had to establish was that it was more than likely that, while Joanne Hayes was ‘carrying on’ with Jeremiah Locke, she was also ‘carrying on’ with another man.
‘Carrying on is a euphemism for having sex.’ He abandoned delicacy.
The judge allowed him to pursue his thesis.
Dr Fennelly believed that she loved Jeremiah Locke. She worried that he was ‘having a rough time of it’ since her arrest. She was afraid that Yvonne would now be taken from her. She worried about her mother, whom she had never told of her third pregnancy and who had now learned about it in the most horrible way.
She described how she had panicked during the birth in the field and said she killed the baby by putting her hands over its mouth ‘after it cried’. The psychiatrist felt that at all times Joanne Hayes was truthful with him.
Anthony Kennedy hailed the intelligence of the child’s cry before death as ‘a magnificent development’. It proved that the baby had achieved a separate existence. It proved that the mother was a killer. It proved that the poli
ce were right to charge her with killing some baby, any baby, details to be sorted out later. The baby had briefly lived and the baby had swiftly died.
Magnificent.
He sketched a picture of the sort of lady they had here, and the psychiatrist agreed with the police lawyer’s outline. He agreed that a woman who kept silent about birth, ‘through thick and thin’, who did not discuss it even with her family, was clearly a person of ‘persistent and resilient make-up’, ‘cute’, ‘of a cunning and scheming nature’ and a ‘fairly devious turn of mind’.
He agreed that mental disturbance at the time of birth in a perfectly stable woman was quite common, even if the childbirth were uneventful, and agreed that until her hormonal level adjusted itself a woman would be in ‘a tricky mental state’.
Still and all, Dr Fennelly said he would give Joanne Hayes the benefit of the doubt that she had not tried to kill her baby. There would not have been, he thought, premeditation.
The psychiatrist was asked to examine Joanne Hayes once more to see how she was, nearly one year after the birth and death of her son in April 1984. He returned to the tribunal to tell them that the sort of lady they had here now, in March 1985, was bright and cheerful and did not appear to be upset. She did not have a great degree of guilt at this stage. ‘Not as much perhaps as I would have thought she would.’ He did not say just how much guilt he felt a woman ought to have.
She was, he agreed with Anthony Kennedy, narcissistic. He did not think she was frigid. She was a sociopath with a histrionic personality. The two men went through the fourteen-point guideline to a histrionic personality and agreed that all the points fitted Joanne Hayes. She exhibited:
1. superficial charm and average or superior intelligence
2. absence of irrationality – at ease in situations which would unsettle the average individual
3. no sense of responsibility
4. no sense of shame
5. a cavalier attitude to telling the truth
6. anti-social behaviour with no apparent regret
7. poor judgement and regular failure to learn from experience
8. lack of genuine insight
9. callousness, insincerity and incapacity for love and attachment
10. little response to special consideration and kindness
11. no history of genuine suicide attempts
12. an unrestrained and unconventional sex life
13. failure to have a life plan, except to follow a consistent pattern of self-defeat
14. the onset of sociopathic characteristics occurring no later than the early 20s
On the other hand, Dr Fennelly pointed out, he had based this assessment partly on what he had read about Joanne Hayes in the papers, and anyway half the population of Ireland fitted that description.
Dr Brian McCaffrey, a psychiatrist who had never met or spoken with Joanne Hayes in his life, was called to comment upon her and upon Dr Fennelly’s assessment of her. He, too, was relying on newspapers and notes, though he had watched her watching Dr Fennelly in court.
He had figured out that she was not suicidal the night Dr Fennelly met her in jail. He disagreed that she must have been depressed, though she must have felt genuine misery, and what’s more he felt that she was the best example of the princess-victim syndrome he had ever encountered. She was a victim of the tribunal and princess of the media.
The two psychiatrists were agreed on one thing only. Both men felt that Joanne Hayes had not purged herself sufficiently to satisfy their standards of normal behaviour for a woman. She had been imprisoned and lodged in a mental home, had cried her heart out before the tribunal, had hyperventilated and vomited, had been sedated and brought back for more, but, said Dr Fennelly, there was ‘not a great degree of guilt at this stage, not as much as I might have thought she would have’.
She didn’t look right, at a distance, to Dr McCaffrey either: ‘It didn’t have the impact on her that it would have on a normal individual.’
Anthony Kennedy suggested that she was ‘actually taking pleasure in her great struggle with the law and even taking pride in her accomplishment in winning, as she’d see it’.
Even, added the judge, ‘taking pleasure in the whole hub-bub that we’re all engaged in?’ Overall, agreed Dr Fennelly, ‘the tribunal hasn’t had a deleterious effect on her’.
‘Which has to be abnormal in some way; to thrive on it,’ said Mr Kennedy. It was perfectly normal of course, for the men to thrive on it; to pore over pictures of dead babies before adjourning to a hearty lunch; to pose specially for the television cameras, any television cameras, after the public had gone home and the day’s speculation on Joanne Hayes’s private life been done with; to make sure the journalists got exactly right every word that issued from their mouths.
That was quite normal.
Anyway, said Dr McCaffrey, clinical director of psychiatry for the Eastern Health Board, Joanne Hayes had ‘got herself pregnant on three occasions’. The tribunal, now nearing the end of its six-month existence, accepted without demur the notion that a woman could impregnate herself at will. It would do in the absence of the superfecundation expert, of whom there was still no sign.
25. Love is for Life
While the tribunal conducted its trial of womanhood, from January to June, the catholic church engaged in a trial of strength with the government over the right to control women’s fertility. Side by side with the headlines about Joanne Hayes ran headlines about the battle between church and state over contraception. The media talked about the biggest, most grave confrontation between the two institutions since the foundation of the republic.
The minister for health wanted to make condoms available, without prescription, to all adults over the age of eighteen. Pharmacists, he stressed, need not sell them if their consciences forbade them.
Kevin McNamara, whose promotion from bishop of Kerry to archbishop of Dublin had been televised as he sat on a throne in the pro-cathedral while women danced before him on the altar, declared that the proposal to sell condoms placed Irish society ‘at a decisive moral crossroads’. He warned that ‘the bitter fruits’ of such a policy would be ‘moral decline, the growth of venereal disease, and a sharp increase in the number of teenage pregnancies, illegitimate births and abortions’. He reminded catholics of the existence of hell and asked how any doctor or health-board official claiming to be christian could say ‘I am prepared, if the state so decides, to supply to those who ask, the means which will help them to commit serious sin?’
Seventeen of the country’s most powerful senior consultants and doctors warned that the liberalisation of contraceptive laws would lead to ‘an increase in promiscuity with an upsurge in venereal diseases and carcinoma of the cervix’, in a letter to the government. Two of these men, Professor John Bonnar and Professor Eamon de Valera, had previously been prominent in the anti-abortion campaign.
All the priests in Kerry signed a statement, read out at all masses, that ‘artificial contraception and premarital sexual intercourse are always wrong’. The Kerry Diocesan Council for the Family, a lay organisation, said that there was no need, nor demand, for change in the laws.
The bishop of Limerick said that the proposed legislation was not acceptable on the grounds of public morality, ‘whether or not the majority of the people might think otherwise’.
Charles Haughey declared his party’s total opposition to the notion of contraception for any but married couples. Several members of the governing coalition fled their homes, declaring that their lives were under threat, three defied the government whip posing the threat of a general election, the corpse of a new-born infant was found in Galway railway station, the statue of the virgin Mary was seen to move in a Kerry church, attracting a weekly sightseeing throng of thousands, and the sale of condoms without prescription was legalised by a narrow majority in Dáil Éireann on 14 February.
In Tralee, eleven of the twelve pharmacies continued their refusal to stock them.
In
March all the catholic bishops of Ireland met in conference and issued a pastoral on love, sexuality and the family, entitled Love is for Life. The bishops defined the meaning of sex. Sexual union, wrote the bishops, was the means by which a man and a woman said to each other:
I love you. There is nobody else in all the world I love in the way I love you. I love you just for being you. I want you to become even more wonderful than you are. I want to share my life and my world with you. I want you to share your life and your world with me. I want us to build a new life together, a future together, which will be our future. I need you. I can’t live without you. I need you to love me, and to love me not just now but always. I will be faithful to you not just now but always. I will never let you down or walk out on you. I will never put anyone else in place of you. I will stay with you through thick and thin. I will be responsible for you and I want you to be responsible for me, for us, no matter what happens.
The pastoral then spelt out the ground rules for achieving this saccharine state of purple bliss. Premarital and extramarital sex was out; so was cohabitation. God’s mercy was there for those unmarried mothers ‘who admit their sin and ask His pardon’. Contraception was out, as was sterilisation. If pregnancy resulted from rape, the ‘right to life’ of the unborn child ‘must be respected’. Divorce was out.
The parish priests of Abbeydorney refused a request from the Hayes family to say mass in their home.
Three days after the bishops had spoken, on 8 March, International Women’s Day, the front page of the nation’s evening newspaper was entirely taken up with stories about the female condition. An unmarried policewoman was under investigation by the force for behaviour prejudicial to it – she had had a baby. A judge had upheld the right of a catholic school board to sack unmarried schoolteacher Eileen Flynn from her post – she had committed adultery and had a baby by the married man with whom she was living. The man had been separated for years from his wife, but divorce is illegal. A government deputy said that women should not be allowed to have jobs because the ‘escalating social disorder’ was due to the fact that ‘married women are leaving the home to work’. Detective Sergeant Gerry O’Carroll told the Kerry babies tribunal that Joanne Hayes – from whom he had secured a confession of murder after interrogating her for eight hours – had probably had sexual intercourse with another man within forty-eight hours of having sexual intercourse with Jeremiah Locke. ‘Ireland is a promiscuous society and there are umpteen such cases,’ he declared.
A Woman to Blame Page 17