A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  Nowhere in this carefully phrased scenario does the judge find that a criminal act has been committed by Joanne Hayes or her family. Given his reputation for accuracy and precision, it is regrettable that he couched his findings in language which could be, and was, widely misread by the legally untutored, who, he must have known, were hanging on his every word. The media, for example, interpreted the judge as saying that Joanne Hayes ‘killed’ her baby. He said no such thing. He is careful to avoid saying that she stopped her baby from breathing by choking it. In directly stating, however, that she ‘stopped the crying by choking’, Judge Lynch ran the serious risk of inviting the public to ask who the judge and Joanne Hayes were trying to kid. The popular understanding is that one chokes in order to stop breath, not cries, issuing from the throat. Joanne Hayes ‘used the bathbrush’ to hit the baby and ‘make sure that it was dead’. One cannot, of course, kill a dead baby and again the judge accuses her of no crime, but the language unfortunately evokes in the unskilled mind an impression of a woman trying to make sure that a premeditated job – the killing of her child – was properly done. If the judge believed that a woman had gone sufficiently crazy to attack a dead child, he should perhaps have said so. The judge does not suggest that the family committed any crime, nor that they tried to assist Joanne Hayes in the commission of one. ‘None of her family tried to assist Joanne Hayes in either choking or hitting the baby’ would perhaps have given a clearer impression than the phrase he used: ‘None of her family tried to stop’ her. Were the family motivated by indifference or transfixed by horror? The judge does not say. The public is left to make up its own mind. The judge does offer some guidance to the public mind in striking an attitude to what would usually, on the evidence, be treated as the accidental death of a baby. Donning a moral cloak, the colours of which bear a striking resemblance to those of catholic theology, Judge Kevin Lynch in this report depicts a family of such moral indifference and corruption that the wrath of God, transcending legal restraints, is called down upon them. The report implies that the source of this corruption is womanhood itself – no man was found to blame for the death of the Kerry babies, but the report infers that women can be saved from themselves. Women can be saved and elevated. The report suggests a distinction should be made between one kind of female and another. Women are saved and elevated to the status of ladies if they become mothers within marriage. Married mothers command respect, the unmarried mother and those women who associate with her activities are not ladies. Joanne Hayes and the women in her family, Mary Locke, wife of Jeremiah Locke, and Mary Moloney, wife of Liam Moloney the Abbeydorney policeman, are examples of the female sex about whom the judge asked the question during the tribunal, ‘What kind of ladies are we dealing with here?’ He found that Mary Moloney was ‘the second most wronged woman’ in the entire matter, the first being Mary Locke. Mary Locke had seen her husband enticed away from herself and her ‘lawful’ child, and Mary Moloney had miscarried her lawful child after receiving obscene phone calls which purported to defend Joanne Hayes. There was no third or fourth or fifth wronged woman. Joanne Hayes and her mother and sister were not, by implication, wronged ladies and Joanne got, by further implication, her just desert for her sexual activities outside of marriage – an illegitimate and bastard child called Yvonne, and the corpse of another illegitimate child.

  Joanne Hayes was depicted by Judge Kevin Lynch as a sexually evil Eve, mesmerising a helpless Adam in the vale of Tralee. She ‘had her eye on him. Joanne Hayes knew perfectly well of the marriage of Jeremiah Locke, yet a little over a year later Joanne Hayes had sexual intercourse with Jeremiah Locke’. Judge Lynch expressed regret that police laziness in tracing Tom Flynn, the man who wrote his name on a mattress sold to the Hayes family in 1965, on which Joanne Hayes then slept, should have led to that man’s character being tainted by association with her. A depraved public, the judge further implied, preferred adultery to marital fidelity. ‘Why no flowers for Mrs Locke?’ he asked, ‘Why no cards or mass cards? Why no public assemblies to support her in her embarrassment and agony? Is it because she married Jeremiah Locke and thus got in the way of the foolish hopes and ambitions of Joanne Hayes?’

  The judge mistook as depravity the sensitivity of the public and media, who tactfully chose to accord Mary Locke the privacy to deal with her undoubted world of grief. The media fell for the moral blackmail of his virtual insistence that the public should now conduct an inquiry of their own into the feelings of Mary Locke. The reply which journalists brought back from her was a rebuke to a man who did not understand why Joanne Hayes’s ordeal before him should have evoked such sympathy. ‘Joanne Hayes was harshly treated,’ said Mary Locke.

  Given this attitude, the cold manner in which the judge treated the night in the farmhouse should have come as no surprise, but it did surprise and deeply wound those who entertained even the slightest hopes of sensitivity to the female condition.

  While acknowledging that the birth was premature, the report takes no account of the implications of this – that whatever happened happened unexpectedly in the middle of the night, in an isolated house with no telephone, to women who could not drive a car, two of whom were elderly and in bad health, the third of whom was in the throes of labour, the fourth of whom had no experience of childbirth whatever. The report does not even acknowledge the pain, grief and silence which the pregnancy caused them long before the birth.

  It is an undisputed fact that the first time any member of the family broke silence about the troubled pregnancy was when Kathleen Hayes went to her cousin’s house in a desperate search for solace. Twenty-four hours later the birth was upon them. The cold and sparse scenario etched by Judge Kevin Lynch does not explore the dilemma of the Hayes women, or attempt to engage sympathy on their behalf, though an imaginative exploration would surely have done so. Had the judge been trying Joanne Hayes in court on a charge of infanticide, he would surely have been bound by the law he serves to show more compassion and mercy than he did when dealing with an accidental death, in his report. The law of this land reduces the charge of murder in such circumstances to infanticide, in recognition of the fact that childbirth and the rearing of an infant for the first year of its life are so stressful that a mother cannot be held fully accountable for her actions.

  Wherever her baby was born, the body of Joanne Hayes burst open to allow it passage into the world. The gynaecologist testified that the flesh of her perineum tore apart. Dr Aidan Daly acknowledged that her blood poured forth in haemorrhage. Nowhere in a comment-studded report does the judge acknowledge the effects of such a birth on a woman’s mind. Childbirth is no tea party.

  This particular childbirth must have been pitifully hamfisted – the frail and elderly recluse Bridie Fuller cut the cord a wild fourteen inches from the infant’s navel. The judge does not deal with the fact that there is absolutely no forensic evidence to show that she tied the cord after cutting it, or the consequences of failure to tie that cord. If the baby lived for half an hour with an untied cord, it should have spouted its life blood through the opened arteries of that cord and bled to death. Joanne Hayes’s baby did not die of blood loss. No trace of blood spurts was found in her bedroom. The cord, speculated the state pathologist, was severed after death. This suggests that the baby died almost at once, after birth, in a scene of bedlam. Did Joanne Hayes, her body split open, try to stop the child crying while it was still bound to her by the umbilical cord? We will never know. The family insists that the baby was born in the field; the judge insists that the baby was born in the bedroom, and he declined to imagine the scene. He says that the bathbrush was used to strike an already dead child but makes no guess about the implications of this – that the baby died in seconds, since it takes only seconds for an infant that cannot breathe to pass from life to death (there was not sufficient time after birth for the child’s lungs to inflate, the state pathologist found), that the family had no time to react, that they looked paralysed upon the scene and were even un
comprehending of the fact that the baby was dead, that Joanne Hayes, in a crazed state and bleeding, went to the bathroom and returned with a bathbrush with which she then attacked her baby, that the family thought they were then witnessing a deliberate killing and that they subsequently tried to protect her by not telling the full story of what they thought they had witnessed. One can conjure up any number of scenarios, all of them involving fear and distress and elderly and young panic-stricken women. Another alternative scenario is one of cold and deliberate inactivity. It is impossible, unless one casts a cold and distasteful eye upon womanhood, to share the judge’s opinion (and it is no more than an opinion) that Mary Hayes was ‘especially annoyed when the child did not appear to be strong’. The inference is that she actually welcomed its death, not just because it was illegitimate, but because it was a sickly little bastard as well. The judge does not ask why children are categorised as illegitimate or wonder if that stigma would ‘persuade’ people that such babies are unwelcome in Ireland. This family lied in the belief that a story of death in the field would render them ‘not all that blameworthy’, the judge found.

  The report throws down a ferocious gauntlet – will compassion be grudgingly extended only if a woman has proved that she truly suffered, in the dark, in the cold, in the open air, as Anne Lovett suffered and died, and as Joanne Hayes claims she suffered and survived, but will that compassion be withheld if a woman has the effrontery to give birth in bed, though the reason for secret birth (in this case unexpected birth) is exactly the same – troubled and unwanted pregnancy. A question haunts the report – by whom are children unwanted. Is the Hayes family to be isolated and carry blame entirely and is it seriously suggested that Irish society is standing proudly by waiting for the child, any child, no matter the circumstances of its parentage. Such an attitude suggests that Irishwomen are motivated by nothing other than individual, selfish, wilful indifference to abandon their newborn in railway stations, in telephone kiosks and before the altars of their God. That Kerry women in particular do not kill their babies before abandoning them is a matter of sheer chance: the judge points out that there are two illegitimate births in Kerry every week and asks, in this context, ‘what is so unbelievably extraordinary about two women attempting to do away with their babies in the same week?’ The phrase bears repetition: ‘attempting to do away with their babies’. The newborn do not die because their mothers are distraught and in social fear. The newborn die because their mothers ‘do away with’ them in the mode of Herod. Diabolical! Woman as anti-Christ! to borrow the exclamation marks with which this man’s report is studded. There is an unfortunate and careless echo of diabolism in the judge’s description of Joanne Hayes as a woman who ‘dominated’ her family and her lover. The tribunal had hard evidence, from a psychiatrist, of another woman who so dominated her family that she persuaded them that she had had sexual intercourse with the devil. The judge settles for suggesting that Joanne Hayes was not in the diabolical but the French tradition: he refers to her ‘affaire’ with Jeremiah Locke. A vision is conjured up of sexually repressed Irish males in the Fifties when they wondered what the hell Brigitte Bardot was up to that the censorship board would not allow them to watch her in the movie And God Created Woman.

  This report’s attitude to sexual relations between men and women is such, if it fairly represents the male view of women. Will this report be enough to drive Irishwomen and their children off the cliffs of Slea Head in suicidal despair? The apparent contrast between the restrained language which the judge employed in assessing the truthfulness of police witnesses who gilded the lily, and the moral virulence of his criticism of the Hayes family, barefaced liars who feared to tell him what he thought was the full truth, is less astonishing when placed in the context of the last few years. In 1983 Bishop Joseph Cassidy declared that the most dangerous place in the world is in a woman’s womb. It is in the womb that the actions and consequences of male sexual behaviour are made flesh. By limiting the male role to taking ‘what’ is available and imposing on women total responsibility for the babies that might result, a conclusion may be drawn that the male buck stops at the entrance to the womb. After that, woman is to blame.

  Her part is to sit, as Joanne Hayes and Kathleen Hayes and Mary Hayes must now sit, in the farmhouse, while a tour bus pulls up on the road outside and the guide tells the story of the Kerry babies.

  Their grief might be eased if people start asking why, not what. Their isolation might be eased if Irish society takes responsibility for surrounding certain pregnancies with odium. Their pain might be shared if Irishwomen speak aloud the anguished truth of their condition. This writer is grateful that this book affords the opportunity to record publicly and permanently her love, sympathy and respect for the Hayes family, and her admiration for the people of Abbeydorney who reached out and stood by their neighbours.