David Quinn
To do away with the constitutional protection for the unborn would merely heap injustice upon injustice, writes David Quinn
The Kerry babies scandal happened a year after the passage of the 1983 pro-life referendum which enshrined the right of life of the unborn in the Constitution. This has to be kept in mind in any analysis of the scandal. The scandal was used, and is used, as a stick with which to beat the pro-life amendment.
At the centre of the Kerry babies case were two dead babies and a woman who was the victim of very rough treatment at the hands of the State, including the Gardaí. One of the babies died naturally. The second – ‘baby John’ – was found washed up on a beach at Cahersiveen. He was a newborn and had been stabbed 28 times.
The woman at the centre of the case was Joanne Hayes who had given birth to the first baby at the family farm and buried it in a field on the farm. This baby was born at more or less the same time as the baby found dead on the beach. The Gardaí decided that Hayes must have been the mother of the baby on the beach and she became the chief suspect in the case.
Theory
When Hayes explained that she had given birth to a different baby, the one buried in the field, Gardaí decided she must have been the mother of both of them by two different men, a fantastical theory. It was proven at the time to the satisfaction of any reasonable person via a blood test that Hayes was not the mother of the baby on the beach, and her lover, Jeremiah Locke, was not the father.
The Kerry babies scandal has now become news again thanks to a new DNA test that categorically confirmed the result of the blood test.
Following the bungled handling of the case by Gardaí in 1984, a tribunal of inquiry was established into the matter which garnered national headlines. Joanne Hayes became a household name.
But instead of the inquiry criticising the Gardaí in the way it should have, the inquiry instead focused more on Hayes and her lifestyle.
Her name was dragged through the mud, seemingly in order to partly explain away how the guards could have believed she had two babies by two men at the same time. (She was already raising a previous child she had by Locke.)
Because of the way Hayes was traduced, her case became a feminist cause celebre. It was held to be symbolic of the way a small-minded, Catholic society treated women, especially unmarried mothers. Remember, this was a year after the 1983 abortion referendum, and moves were already afoot to undo the results of this poll. If the Ireland that voted by a two-to-one margin in favour of the right to life could be blackened, so could the pro-life amendment, also called the Eighth Amendment.
The results of the DNA test were released just as the Dáil prepared to debate the abortion issue. It reminded us again of the ‘terrible’ Ireland that voted for the right to life. Health Minister, Simon Harris, was quick to seize on it as an argument against the amendment. So did his party colleague, Kate O’Connell. So did various feminist commentators.
Was the treatment of Joanne Hayes emblematic of the way society treated women in 1984? Certainly Ireland, in common with many other societies in the past, treated unmarried mothers very badly, but things were already changing very fast by 1984.
The fact that Joanne Hayes was able to raise her first child as a single mother at her family home without being sent away was testimony on its own to that, and she was from rural Ireland, supposedly the most ‘backward’ part of the country.
Journalist Ger Colleran covered the Kerry babies case and co-authored a book about it. He has in the past been a fierce critic of the Catholic Church and of Catholic Ireland, but he does not believe the Kerry babies case can be simplistically woven into a narrative of how misogynistic we were in the 1980s.
He said at the weekend: “The Kerry babies scandal is being reframed now to make it look like it was anti-woman, but it was nothing of the sort. It was a classic case of the powerful steamrolling an entity that threatened it.
Everyone knew Joanne was innocent. But if it was proved, then a lot of powerful and important people would be show to have behaved badly”.
Colleran wrote in the Irish Independent: “It wouldn’t have mattered if Joanne was called John, if she was gay, lesbian, gender fluid, transgender, bisexual or all of the above.
“She was a threat to power. She just happened to be a woman. So they attacked and destroyed her as a woman. That’s how a largely unaccountable state operates”.
Let’s now remind ourselves that the biggest victim of all in the Kerry babies case was the murdered infant, ‘baby John’, as he came to be known.
Did Minister Simon Harris mention him in his Dáil speech calling for repeal of the Eighth Amendment? He did not. That’s an interesting oversight. He was happy to use the Kerry babies case to condemn the Eighth amendment as a supposed relic of a misogynistic past, but he did not highlight the slain infant.
It is very wrong to use the Kerry babies case to argue in favour of abortion. Wrong and perverse. Baby John was killed by a deliberate act, and abortion kills a baby by deliberate act before it is even born.
To do away with the constitutional protection for the unborn would merely heap injustice upon injustice.
David Quinn is author of How we Killed God (and other tales of modern Ireland). Publisher: Currach Press.