Kerry Babies apology is too little, too late

IT was April 14, 1984 when the lifeless body of a baby boy was found on White Strand near Cahersiveen in Co. Kerry. On the same night Joanne Hayes gave birth to a child who died – also a boy – in her home in Abbeydorney, 70km away.

The two tragic deaths were soon to be forever linked, with Joanne Hayes accused of the murder of the Cahersiveen baby on the basis that she was also the likely mother of this second child. The Kerry Babies narrative had begun.

She must have had twins, the gardaí alleged. When proven that Ms Hayes’s partner could not have fathered Baby John, as the Cahersiveen baby became known, the word ‘superfecundation’ then entered the national lexicon when it was proposed that Ms Hayes’s twins had been fathered by different men.

None of this was true. The murder charge against Joanne Hayes was dropped a month after the death of the babies, and the subsequent tribunal, established to investigate the behaviour of the gardaí, also put Ms Hayes under the microscope. Yet it was clearly established through medical evidence at the time that she could not have been the mother of Baby John.

That the gardaí behaved inappropriately is beyond question. And yet only now, with what is deemed conclusive DNA evidence, and almost 34 years later, has Joanne Hayes received an apology from An Garda Síochána. It has taken more than three decades for our police force to acknowledge what a tribunal established all those years ago.

The apology must, of course, be welcomed, but the fact that it has taken such an inordinate length of time is simply shameful. For not only was a young woman falsely accused and cruelly treated by the establishment at the very time when what she most needed was support, but Baby John, for all these years, has also been denied justice.

We can only hope that in 21st-century Ireland no young woman would now find themselves subjected to such brutal and unfair treatment. When Joanne Hayes should have been supported, she instead found herself the subject of a witch-hunt.

An apology may well be an apology, but it’s difficult not to conclude that it is still too little, and far too late.