‘Look how they treated Joanne... why would anyone come forward?
People ask what good it will do dragging up the past and reopening old scars after so many years, writes Nicola Anderson in Cahersiveen
PASSING the grave marked “I am the Kerry baby,” a woman paused to quickly bless herself. “He’s in the news again,” she remarked with gentle regret.
She had her own children around the same time, she explained, gesturing towards the headstone bearing the year 1984 – and so she has never forgotten him.
“Nobody has. We all bless ourselves as we pass,” she said, adding that all the white plaster cherubs clustered on his grave are ‘new’, placed there by others who have not forgotten Baby John either.
As waves crashed thunderously onto White Strand in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry, the glare of the spotlight has again returned to focus on this rocky shoreline where the tiny baby’s body was discovered.
And a town that has held its silence for 34 long years is, also again, fending off an unwelcome attention that has reopened the old scars.
The announcement by gardaí that local DNA samples from the Iveragh Peninsula will be sought has come as something of a bombshell.
And the question on the lips of many is a simple one: why now?
In the 1980s, it was loyalty and, perhaps, the stigma that prevented people from speaking out.
People are still slow to speak out since that loyalty remains and though the stigma may be gone, the question now hangs as to what terrible events lay behind this tragedy.
“What lies behind this must be very dark, very dark,” said one local man of the baby’s death.
“It was a frenzy,” he said of the 28 stab wounds inflicted on his little body.
“What good it will do to investigate it I just don’t know. Maybe it’s best if we never know.”
On one thing they are agreed, however. That justice for Joanne Hayes, so longed for and so well-deserved has been far too long in coming.
“She went through a lot, the craitureen,” said local man James King.
He remembers it well, he says, when ‘the law’ came and knocked on every door and went into every house and the community learned of the extent of the injuries to the baby. “We were..,” he paused, unable to find the right words, miming shock.
“The whole country now knows her conscience is clear,” he said of Joanne.
“She has had her whole life ruined. She deserves a good penny in compensation.”
Of the investigation into the DNA, Mr King was sharply philosophical.
“You’d give your DNA if you were innocent,” he observed.
“Bringing it all back up again...I don’t know,” said one shopkeeper, who had been in deep concentration, reading the coverage of the new developments in her selection of newspapers.
Startled by the question as to whether she would offer up her own DNA for the investigation, she at first hesitated before saying that she would. “If it would help the case,” she added.
Back down on White Strand, the storm was picking up – all the while being closely monitored by the nearby Valentia Observatory, one of the oldest monitoring stations in the world.
A local man had planned on taking his little dog, with an injured paw, down to the strand – but it was impassible due to the incoming tide.
His questions about the investigation at the time ran deeper. “Why did the murder squad which investigated the likes of political murders come down from Dublin for what was basically an infanticide case?” he asked.
He, questioned, too, the timing of the reopening of the investigation, given that DNA technology has been around for “20 years”.
“I just don’t know what’s behind it,” he mused.
“Why wait so long when they already had the information? Why now? What has changed?”
He recalled the shock of the event in 1984 and the widespread incredulity that something like this could happen in their own small village.
However, he did not think it was this incident which had led to societal change and to the weakening of the Church’s power.
‘The way that lady was treated...was there any man inside in the tribunal who would stand up and say for feck sake, stop this’
“What changed Ireland was not Joanne Hayes – but I believe that it was Bishop Eamon Casey that did that,” he said.
“I remember it – it was like a slap in the face for that generation of people.
“That was what started to dismantle the old way of thinking.”
There are still faint echoes of scandal. In a local cafe, we hear a middle-aged mother relaying the saga to an older woman who appears to be a visitor to the area, saying: “an unmarried woman was seeing a man but he was married”.
And there is still a hope in some quarters that Cahersiveen may have nothing intrinsic to do with this tragedy whatsoever.
At the graveside of Baby John, the husband of the woman who had blessed herself put forward the theory that the baby’s remains may even have been thrown overboard from a passing ship.
“There may be no link with this area at all. We just don’t know,” he said.
A man living in Cahersiveen all his life said he was “absolutely delighted” when he heard the Taoiseach and Justice Minister finally issue apologies to Ms Hayes yesterday.
Barbaric
“The way that lady was treated...was there any man inside in the tribunal who would stand up and say for feck sake, stop this,” he said adding that it was barbaric what they put her through in forcing her to give evidence.
“She was sedated and she was getting sick and yet there wasn’t a man, there wasn’t a man...” he repeated.
“You’d wonder why bringing it all up – have they a theory,” he said of gardaí.
A neighbour in her late 80s had asked him what good it was going to do to drag all this back up again, he said.
“She was concerned of whoever had perpetrated it. What was behind it and what good will it do?”
“Judging by the way Joanne Hayes was treated... why would you come forward?” he asked.