I witnessed at f irst hand Joanne being persecuted
SORRY is the hardest word for the State to utter but their regret came 34 years too late for Joanne Hayes and her family who were systematically crushed and spat out by the Kerry Babies scandal. The apology reminded those whose memory had dimmed of the culpability of the gardaí – while the judiciary and legal profession largely avoided any finger-pointing and blame. It’s an anomaly the Taoiseach should revisit.
After his very public apology to Joanne Hayes this week, Leo Varadkar should publicly denounce the legal hocus pocus and judicial findings that traduced Ms Hayes and her family.
The final report of the chairman of the Kerry Babies tribunal failed more than the Hayes family – it soiled the reputation of the Irish judiciary and tainted the legal profession. If a good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of credit, the late Mr Justice Kevin Lynch takes the biscuit – for ineptitude. First and foremost, his tribunal’s findings failed satisfactorily to address the two principal puzzles raised by the Kerry Babies debacle:
Why did the Hayes family confess to a crime they not only did not, but also could not, have committed?
Who killed Baby John who was found on the beach in Cahirciveen?
Like many others, I was shocked by Judge Lynch’s report at the time but our punitive libel laws muted any criticism commensurate with the faults in his findings.
The Hayes’s were a poor farming family of little or no consequence to the powerful lawmen who humiliated them in a public forum day after merciless day.
I was a daily communicant at the tribunal for the 82-days that it sat in 1985 and I watched a tribunal of inquiry into a Garda investigation distort into the quasi-criminal trial of Joanne Hayes.
THE gardaí were the infantry whose investigation was fatally flawed by assumptions made in its earliest days and then they lost their way chasing their original errors. Superfecundation, the theory of how Joanne Hayes could have had twins from different fathers, defied credibility but it illustrated the gardaí’s bizarre thinking at that time.
Legal counsel was the officer class in the tribunal and they used their questionable sophistry to put a façade of faux respectability on crude hypotheses thrown up by an eccentric investigation.
And counsel subjected Joanne Hayes to a more muscular interrogation in the tribunal than any of the suspect war criminals I have seen questioned at the International Criminal Court. That harrowing inquisition went on for five days.
The Hayes family said their false confessions were the result of abuse and intimidation in their interrogation. The gardaí insisted their confessions were spontaneous and voluntary.
Mr Justice Lynch ruled that the Hayeses were not subjected to any abuse or intimidation. Mr Justice Lynch could and should have stopped the abuse of Joanne Hayes. He chose not to. Perhaps he felt counsel haranguing her for five days would reveal why Joanne Hayes confessed to a crime she couldn’t have committed. Colleagues insist that Kevin Lynch was a decent and kind man, an able High Court judge who was promoted to the Supreme Court after the Kerry Babies tribunal. He retired in 1999 and died in 2013. But ultimately the Kerry Babies tribunal was Mr Justice Lynch’s sole responsibility – he was answerable to no one for his inexplicable findings.
Early in the tribunal I was retained by Woman’s Own, the British middlebrow magazine, to secure an exclusive interview with Joanne Hayes. The interest of Britain’s premier woman’s magazine shows the deep interest in, and perception of, the scandal abroad.
The magazine’s editors kept abreast of the evidence heard in the tribunal and planned to portray Joanne Hayes as an heroic woman wronged by sanctimonious hypocrites. I didn’t know if my duties for the ‘one plain, one purl’ knitting pattern readership of Woman’s Own made it obligatory for me to join the women protesting outside the tribunal. But support for Joanne Hayes was not confined to radical feminists.
Alas, Joanne inadvertently gave an interview to an English newspaper before speaking to Woman’s Own, voided her contract and sacrificed a substantial sum of money. Pity, I liked Joanne and her family and knew they needed the money.
LAST week a lot of the reporting about the Kerry Babies scandal in the mid-1980s stressed how different a country Ireland was then: devoutly Catholic with a scarcity of contraception. Nightclubs on Dublin’s Leeson Street had many lawyer customers while another on Baggot Street kept an open door for politicians. I lived in Dublin back then and none of the people I knew went without contraception or wanted for any other sin available in other major international cities at that time.
Still, back in 1985 the veil was still in place: Bishop Casey’s son was still a secret; ferries carried pregnant Irish women to English abortion clinics; clerical child abuse was not due to be reported until the 1990s.
Hypocrisy was a convertible currency – and the chairman of the tribunal and some of the lawyers spent it lavishly tut-tutting at the sexual life of Joanne Hayes.
The libido of the legal profession and even the judiciary is usually discreet but I am assured that it was, and is, regularly exercised. Pity that the lawyers and judges did not extend to Joanne Hayes the tolerance and prudence they share with each other.