The greatest tribute to Clodagh and her children is the way her family stood up for them after death

IMAGINE visiting the grave of a loved one, your husband or wife, perhaps, or your son or daughter. Hard to imagine, I know, until such a horror is actually real, but try, nonetheless, to visualise it for a moment.

They aren’t long dead and the grief, manifest like a physical sundering of your heart, is still overwhelming.

So you find yourself drawn to the grave, not occasionally, but every day. And you stand there and you look at the ground where, even though you can’t actually take it in, you know they now lie. And you talk to them. And you bring a few flowers to place there in an act of love and remembrance.

And as you lay those flowers down on the clay, you feel it surge up again. The anger. And you try to quell it because, well, that’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what we generally settle for because that’s what is expected of us, after all, when we find ourselves in the midst of ‘a family tragedy’.

Disbelief

But the anger won’t go away. For in that muddy tomb, under that rounded mound of earth where the ground has not yet ‘settled’, lies not just your own loved one, but the person who took them from you. Their murderer.

That’s what Clodagh Hawe’s family had to endure for eight long months. Standing there in the grounds of St Mary’s in Castlerahan, Co. Cavan, and looking down at the final resting place of Clodagh, her three young sons – and the man who calculatedly and savagely executed them all.

Alan Hawe. Husband, father, killer. A family parted in life – by his hand. But now, in St Mary’s graveyard, all together again in death.

And Clodagh’s family couldn’t stomach it. Couldn’t play along with the notion that this was all a terrible tragedy and weren’t they all in a better place now, and all together again as a family. So the first sign was the exhumation. As the initial shock and disbelief gave way to the reality of what had happened in August 2016, Clodagh Hawe’s mother and sister decided that they were having none of it. Mary Coll, Clodagh’s mother, certainly wasn’t allowing Alan Hawe to lie there with her beloved daughter and her three adored grandsons. She wanted him removed. She wasn’t having them sullied by his presence.

And so it was that at dawn, on a Wednesday morning last May, the remains of Alan Hawe were exhumed from the Cavan graveyard, leaving Clodagh and her boys in peace.

The Coll family had stood their ground.

Now, this week at the inquest, during harrowing testimony and with much emotion in the courtroom, we witnessed the remarkable Coll family in action yet again.

Despite the fact that Alan Hawe’s GP of some five years’ standing had never detected any signs of depression in her patient, an assessment by psychiatrist Professor Harry Kennedy – who never met Hawe – concluded that there were issues of mental health involved that pointed to depression. That that was the reason, in other words, that led him to cut the throats of his wife and young sons, starting with Clodagh and his eldest son, 13-year-old Liam, the two most likely to resist and challenge his murderous intent.

Yet David McConnell, the psychotherapist who Alan Hawe had attended for counselling, reported that Clodagh’s husband had never made any disclosures that suggested suicidal tendencies were at play. He had seen him ten times, most recently some weeks before the murders.

Villainy

Yes, Alan Hawe was anxious, David McConnell said, he had previously seen a marriage guidance counsellor, he wanted to get his family life back on track, and he was concerned about what he perceived as a likely fall from grace as a ‘pillar of the community’. He was worried about no longer being Mr Perfect in the eyes of the local townspeople. He was concerned about his own standing. In other words, totally focused on himself.

He left behind a five-page letter, believed to have been written after he had already slaughtered his family. Just think about that for a moment – did he have to search for a notepad, or had he already located one earlier, knowing that he would need it when his villainy was complete? Had he placed it somewhere in particular, on the table, perhaps, where the family ate breakfast together, or enjoyed Christmas dinner and family birthday meals? Did he have to go looking for a pen, in a drawer, in Clodagh’s handbag, or in one of the boys’ schoolbags that were all ready for the return to the classroom after the summer holidays? It’s probably better that we don’t know the answers to those questions.

What we do know, though, is that within the pages of that letter, Alan Hawe tried to justify the butchering of his family by saying that he didn’t think his young sons could cope if he took his own life and left them behind. The arrogance of that, the pure selfishness of it, and yet how many times have we heard that before from fathers in this country who have murdered their children before taking their own lives? On countless occasions.

Sadness

Mary Coll and her surviving daughter, Jacqueline Connolly, have stated that they don’t accept that the man who murdered their family was suffering from depression. But, unlike many bereaved family members who, through no fault of their own, often sit shell-shocked at inquests and simply accept all that is put before them, the Colls were not prepared to do that this week.

So when Prof. Kennedy concluded his evidence and the coroner asked if the family had any questions, from her seat, and with her arms defiantly folded, Mary Coll spoke out, addressing the psychiatrist directly.

‘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?’ she asked Prof. Kennedy

When told by the psychiatrist that he was constrained when it came to the evidence, Clodagh’s mother wasn’t being fobbed off.

‘I know that,’ she retorted. ‘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?’

She didn’t get a straight answer, but Mary Coll had made her point. She was honouring her daughter by challenging the ‘expert’, by ensuring that when it came to her family and to the man who had taken them from her, there would be no whitewash on her watch.

This Christmas, Clodagh and her boys lie together – just the four of them – in the Cavan clay. When Mary and Jacqueline stand at their graveside on Christmas Day, the sadness, of course, will still overwhelm them. But the anger will be gone.

And so, having battled on their behalf and having truly honoured their murdered loved ones, hopefully, this Christmas, Clodagh’s remarkable family may also find some peace.