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Nell McCafferty, A Woman To Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (1985)

On 14 April 1984 the body of a new-born baby was found on a County Kerry beach. The Garda investigation focused on women due to give birth in nearby Cahirciveen and charged Joanne Hayes with its murder. The baby had been stabbed twenty-eight times. Hayes, a twenty-four-year-old single mother, known to have been pregnant, told her friends that she had miscarried in hospital but had in fact given birth to her child in her home and hidden its body on the family farm. It became subsequently clear that this child was not the baby that had been washed up on the beach. But by then the Gardaí had extracted a signed confession from Joanne that she had stabbed her baby and corroborating statements from Joanne’s brothers Ned and Mike Hayes that Joanne had given birth to a baby, stabbed it, and that they had thrown its body off a cliff into the sea. Other family members also gave statements along these lines to detectives from the Murder Squad drafted down from Dublin. After being interrogated her family returned to their farm, searched the area where Joanne said she had concealed her miscarried child, found its body and reported this to the Gardaí. The Gardaí then held a press conference where they claimed that Joanne had given birth to twins.

But the babies were found to have different and incompatible blood groups. They could not have had the same father. The Gardaí stuck to their claim that Joanne was the mother of both and advanced a theory of superfecundation – that she had been impregnated by two men around the same time – something that was theoretically possible but unprovable given the weakness of corroborating technical and forensic evidence. For example, there was no forensic evidence that a baby had been stabbed in Joanne’s bed as the confessions obtained by the Gardaí had claimed. Furthermore, there was no evidence that the baby that was buried on the farm was not a stillbirth. The case built up by the Gardaí against Joanne Hayes was riddled with inconsistencies. The Director of Public Prosecutions advised the Garda Superintendent to withdraw the charges at the earliest opportunity. On 10 October 1985 the Hayes family learned in court that all charges against them had been dropped. In response to the controversy generated by the Kerry Babies Case and criticism of the Gardaí, the Minister of Justice convened a tribunal of inquiry into the conduct of the Gardaí and the circumstances in which the charges against Joanne Hayes and her family had come to be made and withdrawn. This was meant to sit in Tralee for three weeks from 7 January 1986 but the inquiry lasted for five months during which 61,000 questions were asked of 109 witnesses.

Much of the inquiry focused on Joanne Hayes rather than upon the conduct of the Gardaí who had extracted dubious confessions and statements. The young woman to blame had entered into a sexual relationship with Jeremiah Locke, a married colleague at the leisure centre in Tralee where she worked as a receptionist. She became pregnant in 1982 but miscarried at work. The following year she became pregnant by him again and gave birth to a daughter who was accepted into her family. Then in 1984 she became pregnant for a third time, gave birth at home in the middle of the night to a baby who died and who she put in a paper bag, wrapped in plastic and placed in a waterlogged ditch near her home.

McCafferty’s account of the inquiry used techniques honed during the 1970s in celebrated reports she wrote for the Irish Times on cases that came before the district courts.1 These focused on the treatment of defendants by judges, lawyers and the Gardaí with acerbic humour but always with the serious intent of highlighting, as she put it, the gaps between law and justice. This was often managed by simply recording the remarks of judges (‘I just let them open their mouths and put their feet in. I always named the judges, never the guards or the criminals’).2 A Woman to Blame challenged the ability of the male participants in the tribunal to understand Joanne Hayes’s experiences:

None of the fifteen legal men, comprising judge, senior and junior barristers and solicitors had ever witnessed childbirth. ‘Is it possible’, the judge was to ask ‘for a woman to give birth standing up?’ Women have given birth underwater, in aeroplanes, in comas, lying unnaturally flat on their backs in hospital beds, and even after death, but this man wondered if they could do it standing up. One had even a glancing experience of matters connected with the female reproductive system. Martin Kennedy, senior counsel for the three superintendents, had taken part in the pro-life campaign, canvassing the plush seaside suburb of Dalkey near Dublin.

While Jeremiah Locke was engaging in serial impregnation of two women, Mr Kennedy had been assuring voters, on behalf of a Fianna Fáil party that opposed contraception for single people, that the baby in a woman’s womb needed constitutional protection.3

McCafferty attacked what she saw as a fear and loathing of, and hypocrisy about, female sexuality that pervaded the inquiry. As put in the opening paragraph of her book:

In the opening days of the ‘Kerry babies’ tribunal a married man went to bed in a Tralee hotel with a woman who was not his wife. He was one of the forty-three male officials – judge, fifteen lawyers, three police superintendents and twenty-four policemen – engaged in a public probe of the private life of Joanne Hayes.

When this particular married man was privately confronted with his own behaviour he at first denied it. Then he crumpled into tears and asked not to be exposed. He had so much to lose, he said. ‘My wife…my job… my reputation…’ He was assured of discretion.

No such discretion was assured to Joanne Hayes, as a succession of professional men, including this married man, came forward to strip her character.4

The Kerry Babies controversy occurred in the wake of the politics of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution on the right to life of the unborn and exemplified the messy and uneven shift towards social liberalism that accompanied the decline of Catholic power. In the aftermath of Pope John Paul’s 1980 visit to Ireland Catholic conservative groups pushed for a constitutional prohibition on abortion. McCafferty likened these to the neoconservative movements that had emerged in the United States following the 1973 Roe versus Wade Supreme Court ruling that allowed abortion. What she described as a ‘fundamentalist backlash against feminism’ occurred in a context where even divorce was still illegal in Ireland. Divorce, McCafferty recalled, had not even featured in the list of reforms sought by Irish feminist groups during the early 1970s. Even though there had been no campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland, Catholic conservatives managed to politicise the issue as a clear and present danger to the moral fabric of Irish society.

In 1983 almost seventy per cent of the electorate who voted in the Referendum approved of the insertion of a new Article 40.3.3 into the Constitution declaring that the State ‘acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, by its laws defend and vindicate that right’. Even though Catholicism was on the wane – Church attendance and vocations had been falling for two decades by then – a Catholic conservative public morality still prevailed.

The Kerry Babies case exemplified unresolved conflicts between this status quo and the real everyday lives of ordinary Irish people. The ‘pro-life’ campaign took place in a context where women who became pregnant outside of marriage – got into trouble being the common euphemism – were stigmatised and encouraged by welfare organisations to keep their pregnancies secret, usually by moving away from home until the birth of their child, then to give their babies up for adoption. Many others, an estimated 3,700 in 1983, travelled to England to have abortions. But during 1984 some 103 ‘illegitimate’ births were registered in Kerry, almost two per week. The death of the Kerry babies occurred a few months after fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett gave birth to a baby in a grotto that celebrated the Virgin Birth in Granard, County Longford. Both mother and child died.

McCafferty’s 24 February 1984 Irish Times essay on their deaths noted that the grotto was one of the most secluded places in Granard. The Convent of Mercy School retained a solicitor to issue a statement that its staff did ‘not know’ that Ann Lovett was pregnant. McCafferty referred to one dissident teacher who supposedly ‘could not stomach’ the nice legal distinction between ‘knowing’ and ‘suspecting’. Such denials, she argued, conveniently placed all blame on the Lovett family:

The townspeople cannot or will not help them bear that ordeal. It will be up to the family to explain how could it be that their daughter died unaided and alone. The efforts of the townspeople are directed towards explaining how they, the townspeople, could not come to her aid, though her condition was common knowledge.5

Don’t ask the State or the Church or the People, she concluded. They did their duty in 1983 by amending the Constitution so as to ensure that all pregnancies would be brought to full term; ‘Nowhere in that amendment was provision made for life or lives beyond the point of birth.’

In her autobiography McCafferty recalled strident hostility towards women who campaigned for a right to contraception during the 1970s. The ‘singing priest’ Father Michael Cleary, a regular on radio and television programmes, was abusive when she leafleted his parish in Ballyfermot in 1977. It subsequently emerged that he had already fathered two children by the housekeeper who lived with him. Senator Mary Robinson, later Ireland’s first woman President, received packets of excrement through the post at the time because she had sought to introduce a bill legalising contraception in limited circumstances.6 Cleary was given a high- profile role in the reception of Pope John Paul in 1980 along with Bishop Eamon Casey who had also secretly fathered a child.

Support for the ‘pro-life’ referendum in Kerry had been very strong. Fifty of Kerry’s leading sportsmen pledged their support for the campaign as did the two main local newspapers, The Kingdom and The Kerryman. Sermons by the local Catholic bishop pronouncing that artificial methods of contraception were sinful were published verbatim in The Kerryman. The Kingdom also backed the ‘pro-life’ campaign. It printed pictures of a foetus on its front page along with descriptions of abortions. Kerry’s doctors and pharmacists, according to McCafferty, acted as moral policemen. None of the eight doctors in Tralee openly declared that they were willing to prescribe contraceptives. Some pharmacists were willing to sell the contraceptive pill when it had been prescribed as a cycle regulator. Ten of the twelve pharmacies in Tralee refused to stock condoms as did the sole pharmacy in Cahirciveen. Women seeking contraception advice in closely-knit communities could only do so by becoming conspicuous and by facing down disapproval and stigma. But Irishwomen of Joanne Hayes generation:

… had begun to take their place in the paid workforce, were asserting their sexual freedom, and were paying a painful price in the absence of contraceptive protection. The number of children born outside of marriage had risen from 1,709 in 1970 to 3,723 in 1980. The number of women seeking abortion in England had shot up from 1,421 in 1970 to 3,673 in 1983.7

The gap between social mores and laws governing sexuality was clearly widening. The Kerry Babies case highlighted the disjuncture between Catholic teaching on sexuality and how some at least Kerry Catholics expressed their sexuality, how the pregnancies of unmarried women were both known about but could not be spoken about in public or amongst families.

A Woman to Blame describes how hundreds of women sent individual yellow roses to Joanne Hayes, organised by a Tralee women’s group. The first flower had been ordered with meticulous instructions on 20 January 1985: a single yellow flower, wrapped in cellophane, to be delivered to Joanne Hayes at the building where the tribunal was sitting before the one-thirty national radio news, if possible. As described in A Woman to Blame a feminist network ‘had fretted into action’ and thirty orders for flowers were placed – Joanne emerged from the courthouse later that day clutching them – followed later by hundreds more flowers, letters and mass cards as the campaign caught hold.8 It would have been wishful thinking, McCafferty wrote, to conclude that there were that many active feminists in Ireland. Expressions of solidarity came from women in all walks of life:

Joanne Hayes received more than five hundred letters, cards and notes which invoked, on her behalf, the intercession of a loving God who was clearly and certainly seen to be 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.9

A Woman to Blame gave prominent emphasis on expressions of solidarity to Joanne Hayes by other women appalled by her treatment. The effect of the Kerry babies controversy, McCafferty argued, was to break the fearful silence about sexuality that had been imposed by the amendment campaign:

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.10

In her autobiography McCafferty states that she had in fact organised the ‘yellow flower’ protest. She had been covering the tribunal for The Irish Press.11 She had come to journalism out of the civil rights movement in Derry where she grew up. She was a lesbian in a country where homosexuality was criminalised and a member of women’s groups struggling to find acceptance for female heterosexuality. She eschewed feminist theory for a language that spoke of the everyday lives of ordinary women and for the weapons of satire. In a 1983 essay ‘Golden Balls’, she described how the teenage son of a Fianna Fáil TD had taken to hanging around the Dáil Bar handing out ‘pro-life’ pins with tiny gold-plated feet. Her modest proposal was that instead, men should be allowed to wear a pair of golden balls on their lapels. These balls would signify that the wearer declines unprotected sexual intercourse with females of child-bearing age. Before they received their golden balls men would have to undergo a simple sex education course where they would be instructed on such matters as sperm count, menstruation, zygotes, implantation, nappy-washing, the four a.m. feed, the length of the Dublin Corporation housing list and the factors influencing the repayment of foreign borrowings which in turn influenced Ireland’s ability to feed all newcomers. Any man found without his balls would have to give an account of his movements to a ‘ban garda’ (policewoman). Any man proposing sexual intercourse with a woman would be required to hand his balls into her safekeeping until such time as her period has arrived or the baby is born; in the latter case, possession of a man’s balls by the woman would be proof of paternity.12

BF

Notes

1Collected in Nell McCafferty, In the Eyes of the Law (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1981).

2Nell McCafferty, Nell (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2004), p.295.

3Nell McCafferty, A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (Dublin, Attic Press, 1985), p.75.

4Ibid., p.7.

5Nell McCafferty, ‘The Death of Ann Lovett’, Irish Times, 24 February 1984.

6See McCafferty, Nell, p.297.

7Nell McCafferty, A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (Dublin, Attic Press, 1985) p.33.

8Ibid., p.115.

9Ibid., p.117.

10Ibid., p.117.

11Nell, p.370.

12Nell McCafferty, In Dublin, 3 June 1983.