DETERMINED MOTHER QUESTIONS EVIDENCE AS TEARS SHED AT INQUEST CONCLUSION

THE time had come to read the verdicts. As the jury chairperson, a middle-aged woman with glasses, rose to her feet, the A4 sheet in her hand began to tremble.

She started with Clodagh, determining a verdict of ‘unlawful death’, before offering the same verdict for Clodagh’s three sons.

As she named each boy in term, Liam first, then Niall and finally Ryan, her voice quivered with emotion. She gulped hard, visibly fighting back tears. ‘We are absolutely so sorry,’ she later said to Clodagh’s family, the Colls.

It was a poignant end to a harrowing two days of jury service at the inquest into the deaths of the Hawe family.

More than once during evidence there had been audible gasps of horror from the public gallery, tears shed by Clodagh’s mother and sister and eyes shut tight in despair at all that was so cruelly taken on August 29, 2016.

In her own summing up, coroner Dr Mary Flanagan acknowledged that this was the first time in all her career that she had a witness, and a jury chairperson almost moved to tears.

‘There are no words to describe the upset that befell your family,’ Dr Flanagan said, addressing the Coll family directly.

‘It’s unimaginable, what you have had to endure.’

Earlier, after the jury retired to consider their verdict, the coroner had made her way to the front row of the public gallery, where the shattered members of the Coll family wear sitting.

KNEELING over Clodagh’s sister Jacqueline, she gripped her hand tightly, whispering in her ear with a look of reassurance. Moving to mother Mary, who was by now crying, she gently patted her knee.

Clodagh’s mother looked close to breaking point.

After the trauma of giving evidence as a witness on Monday, she had yesterday taken the brave step of questioning the testimony of psychiatry professor Harry Kennedy.

Professor Kennedy, who carried out a report for the coroner based on Hawe’s medical records and suicide note, said the father-of-three had been suffering from a severe mental illness.

‘Do the family have any questions?’ asked Dr Flanagan when Prof. Kennedy had completed his evidence.

Mary Coll’s voice, one that on Monday had been filled with fear and trepidation, had a new sense.

She was sitting upright in her seat, with her arms defiantly folded. ‘Do you ever, when you are doing a summary based on documentary evidence, do you ever consider interviewing the family of those murdered or the family of the murderer?’

Her question, pointed and direct, was greeted with a look of empathy from the witness.

‘I’m entirely constrained in the evidence before the coroner,’ began Prof. Kennedy.

Mary Coll wasn’t letting the issue go. As she steeled herself to speak again, her daughter Jacqueline gripped her hand tightly.

‘I know that,’ she replied, ‘but my question is, seeing that you never met Alan Hawe, Clodagh or his family, did you ever consider speaking to the family in relation to him and how he was?... I knew him for 20 years. I didn’t know him, but I did know him.’

Prof. Kennedy, who offered condolences directly to the family, replied: ‘There’s a very important distinction between the role of a clinician seeing the family and helping the family and the role I’m asked to fulfil here to assist the court.’

Although there had been no real answer to the question, Mary Coll had got her point across.

She was clearly frustrated by the assertion that her son-in-law was mentally ill at the time he became a murderer, a frustration that was mirrored in the agitated state of her surviving daughter Jacqueline.

VISIBLY annoyed, Mrs Connolly told the professor that she had questions, but added: ‘They are not within the limitations of the (Coroner’s) Act.’

As proceedings finally drew to a close, it was the simplest of gestures that alluded to the deep sense of sorrow felt by all involved in the case.

One by one, each juror made their way up to the Coll family, hugging each one tightly as they parted ways.

Later, as Mary Coll and her daughter made their way out of Cavan Courthouse for the final time, the twinkling lights on Farnham Street poignantly dotted their path. In just a few days’ time, families will return home to the welcome arms of loved ones. Children will delight in the joy that is Christmas. For the Coll family, the festive season will act as another painful reminder of all that has been lost.