A Woman to Blame Read online

  The gravedigger had kept a watch on the Kerry baby’s grave and no mother had returned to it. The priests had appealed from the pulpits in vain. A light plane seen flying over the area before the baby’s death had been checked out and no parcel had been thrown from it.

  Have you noticed anything unusual, anything at all, the guards asked whoever they met. There were twenty-eight guards looking everywhere. One of those guards was to go home, later, and be awakened in the night by his wife to be told that their daughter had gone unexpectedly into labour in the bedroom next door. The baby was subsequently adopted.

  3. Suspect Family

  In the second week of the woman-hunt some members of the crack Dublin murder squad had come down to help. They were Kerrymen by birth. Their leader was Superintendent John Courtney, who was reared in the north Kerry mountain village of Anascaul. Detective Sergeants Gerry O’Carroll and P.J. Browne hailed from Listowel, a market town on the plains which hosted an annual writers’ week, under the benign eye of local playwright and short-story writer John B. Keane, whose literary excoriations of the tortured rural sexual psyche were renowned. Gerry O’Carroll was wont, in the course of the tribunal, to quote verbatim from Germaine Greer’s Sex and Destiny. He referred listeners particularly to her chapters on coitus interruptus and infanticide. P.J. Browne was the writer of police reports.

  As the local guards swept south Kerry, Detective Sergeant Dillon, stationed in the county capital, Tralee, in north Kerry, was asked to make his own enquiries in that town. He made three phone calls.

  The first was to CURA, the catholic organisation that helps unmarried mothers. CURA had been established in Kerry in October 1983 in the wake of the anti-abortion campaign. In contrast to the seventy marriage counsellors which the church provided for the kingdom, CURA had only three. The existence of these three counsellors was not widely known. After the Cahirciveen baby was found, they had sent an anonymous letter to the county paper, The Kerryman, advising women who needed their help to make contact with them by ringing their head office in Limerick or Cork.

  CURA counsellors have to remain anonymous because they also function as social workers, in the employ of government, and there is a conflict of interest. The police, of course, know exactly who the counsellors are.

  Detective Dillon’s friend in CURA could not help.

  He then made an equally fruitless call to his contact in the Bon Secours hospital. His contact in St Catherine’s hospital, however, gave him precise and detailed information of three unmarried women who had been in the maternity ward, in or around the time the Cahirciveen baby had been discovered. Detective Dillon’s contact furnished alibis for two of the three women, declaring that CURA ‘was looking after them and was fairly satisfied with both positions’.

  The hospital, nominally controlled by the state, is run by the Sisters of Mercy nuns, who work closely with CURA.

  There was an ‘inconclusive file’ on the third woman, Joanne Hayes, said the contact. She had come into the maternity ward on 14 April a few hours before the Cahirciveen baby was found. The file on her read ‘scan and uterus recently emptied’.

  It had taken the detective exactly ninety minutes to come up with her name. Hours later he went out to the hospital and spoke to John Creedon, the gynaecologist who had treated her.

  Mr Creedon was one of those doctors who had signed a public statement declaring that the unborn child needed protection. His superior, Mr Doyle, also signed the ‘pro-life’ statement, because he was willing to supply married women with an intra-uterine contraceptive device. It was known locally that these doctors had uncomplimentary rhyming nicknames related to their distaste for artificial methods of birth control.

  Joanne Hayes had told him that she had not had a baby, Mr Creedon told Detective Dillon, though the compelling evidence of the scan, which he had twice taken of her womb, suggested otherwise. He was keeping an open mind.

  Mr Creedon was used to women coming into hospital for treatment after secret home births. In eight years he had attended five of them. He said that eventually they would all admit to a dead baby somewhere, and would be persuaded to bring the body in for a coroner’s report. There was never any need to involve the police. In this instance, he had determined that eventually he might have to consult his solicitors. ‘If we are in doubt, what is our position?’ Ultimately the question should be addressed to the ethical committee of the medical register council, said the man who had appealed to voters with such assurance during the ‘pro-life’ campaign.

  Joanne Hayes stayed in his hospital for six days, and was then released by him to make her own way in the world. During her stay, he stressed, he had asked the hospital chaplain, Father Quinlan, to speak with her. The chaplain, who is also head of CURA in Kerry, is of course bound by confidentiality in both roles. He can only report back to Mr Creedon if the patient authorises him to do so. Father Quinlan did not report back. The hospital notes showed, though, said Mr Creedon, that after speaking with the priest his patient was ‘recovered somewhat in spirit though depressed in demeanour’. He sometimes referred distressed patients to a psychiatrist, said Mr Creedon, but in this case had not done so.

  His patient had now been referred to the police. He knew that they were looking for the mother of the Cahirciveen baby. He advised them that they were on the wrong track. If they should go and look around Abbeydorney, he placed the matter in their hands, they would probably find her baby there. He did not consider Joanne Hayes to be the kind of demented woman who would have stabbed her baby to death. She had the same demeanour as all those other women who had come sadly into hospital with voided wombs and a missing infant. She also had, as Detective Dillon knew by now, the perfect profile of a prime suspect in the case. Before he went to see Mr Creedon, he had gone out to Abbeydorney to speak to the village’s only policeman, Liam Moloney.

  Guard Moloney had known that Joanne Hayes was pregnant, but had not connected that pregnancy with the Cahirciveen baby. In fact, he had written ‘No suspects’ in the questionnaire sent to all police stations some days previously. There was one sure way of checking, said Guard Moloney, and he rang Joanne’s cousin, Mary Shanahan.

  Mary Shanahan told him Joanne had miscarried in hospital. Guard Moloney told Detective Dillon what Mary Shanahan had just told him. Detective Dillon told Guard Moloney what the hospital had said. There was a query about the miscarriage. Guard Moloney then told Detective Dillon about the Hayes family.

  There are less than two hundred families in Abbeydorney and Guard Moloney, who had been stationed there for seven years, knew the people well. He knew the Hayes family, who lived two miles outside the village on the way to Tralee, particularly well. Their sixty-acre scrub farm had passed on to the family through the lately deceased Maurice Fuller, sole brother of Joanne’s mother Mary. Maurice Fuller had been a peace commissioner, and the guards used to go up to the house regularly to have things signed by him. The farm effectively supported two families. In the ancestral family dwelling, a long single-storey house, Maurice Fuller had lived with his spinster sister Bridie, a nurse. A hundred yards away, in a small county-council cottage, lived his sister Mary, her husband Paddy Hayes and their children Kathleen, Ned, Mike and the youngest, Joanne.

  The brothers-in-law Maurice Fuller and Paddy Hayes worked the farm, milking sixteen cows and rearing a similar number of cattle for beef. Bridie Fuller, the unmarried sister, worked in St Catherine’s hospital, the four Hayes children went to school and Mary Hayes kept both houses. She established her domestic headquarters in the old farmhouse, and everyone ate there by day and mingled there by night.

  The Hayes family had never adapted to the confined quarters of the little council house and its location on the main road. For two years after it was built, they used it as a place to store grain and farm materials and continued to live in the Fuller home. The farmhouse was thatched with straw, and water had to be fetched from the well, but it was home to Mary Hayes, and the council dwelling with its modern conve
niences was not. Eventually they had to move there for sleeping purposes to comply with the contract of tenancy, but real life was firmly centred on the farmhouse. It had been that way for as long as she could remember.

  II

  Mary Fuller’s father, a primary-school teacher, had married into the farm and Mary was eventually chosen to help keep domestic order in what had become an extended family. As well as her father’s elderly in-laws, the unmarried brother and sister of his wife, there were Mary’s own brothers and sisters, Maurice, Kitty, Bridie and Joan.

  Maurice was chosen to run the farm and the others moved out into the world. Kitty trained as a teacher and went off to a convent, where she became Sister Aquinas. Bridie trained as a nurse, joined the British army and was sent off to Malaya. Joan went off to London to take up domestic service.

  Mary never left the homestead. In all her life she had never held a paid job. Sometimes she cleaned the home of an elderly neighbour, and was given a few shillings.

  Abbeydorney during Mary’s teenage years is vividly recalled by Tom Shanahan, now a retired police inspector. In 1935, he says, there was widespread depression caused by Éamon de Valera’s economic war with England, of which Ireland was still a colony. Dev had refused to hand over land annuities and the British responded with an embargo on all Irish agricultural produce. This became known as the tariff war. ‘The birth of a calf became the saddest event on Irish farms. Within twenty-four hours of its birth the calf was slaughtered and its skin sold to obtain a bounty of ten shillings offered by the government for the skin of a new-born calf.’

  Secondary education was a privilege. Those who could afford it cycled long distances to the nearest town. In Abbeydorney parish there were four motor cars, three of them used for hackney work. The bicycle, the ass and cart, the pony and trap were the modes of transport. Radios were few and far between. There was no electricity. The paraffin-oil lamp and the candle illuminated the darkness. Street lighting outside of cities was non-existent, and the beckoning light of distant countries was dimmed. The worldwide depression brought emigration to the USA to a standstill and few could get work in England.

  In 1935 two significant events occurred. The Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS) was formed in Tralee and thousands attended the inaugural meeting. The priest who addressed them underlined the evil of industrial action, which caused strikes and a drop in productivity, urged the abolition of trade unions and ‘class warfare’, recommended respect for employers, stated that the Russian revolution of 1917 had brought economic chaos in its wake, warned against red infiltration in Ireland, advanced the poverty of his audience as proof that it had already occurred, and asked them to join with him in the fight against communism. He was cheered to the rafters and the young men formed a branch of the CYMS called ‘Our Lady of the Assumption’, in memory of the direct ascent from earth to heaven of a woman without sin who did not suffer the pangs of punishing death.

  Then there was a move against dancing. The parish dance halls that afforded entertainment ‘were regarded by the clergy of the time as a threat to the morals of the youth’, and a Public Dance Halls Act was passed in February 1935 to regulate their control. The priests came to court when applications for a licence to run the halls were being heard and some succeeded in having their own conditions written into the licence. One of the most bizarre was the condition known as the three-mile limit. This meant that if a man or a woman lived more than three miles from a dance hall, he or she could not legally enter that hall. The intent of this was to preserve the morals of the local community. The gardaí were under clerical pressure to enforce this limit and a number of prosecutions were brought.

  Confined at home, crowded onto farms with no prospect of work outside them, or cherishing the notion in unsettled foreign places that one day they’d come back and make a proper home, the rural people of the time were distinguished in one notable respect: either they did not marry or they married late.

  Mary Fuller was the only one of her family to marry. She married the man who grew up beside her, one field away, when she was thirty-four years of age. It was then 1954 and Paddy Hayes came to live in the farmhouse with her and her aunt and Maurice Fuller and Bridie Fuller, who had returned from Malaya to nurse her dying mother and never gone away again. Paddy Hayes helped Maurice Fuller run the farm, Bridie had a job in Tralee hospital and Mary kept house. The next generation came along.

  III

  Four children were born of the marriage – Kathleen in 1954, Ned in 1957, Mike in 1958 and Joanne in 1959 – and Mary Hayes reared them from her lifelong vantage point, the range in the kitchen in the farmhouse in which she had been born. To her countrywoman’s eye, the council house that was built in 1963 was fit only for sleeping in.

  After the deaths of her husband in 1975 and her brother Maurice in 1976, the farm was run by Mary’s son Mike. Kathleen had an office job in a laundry in Tralee, Ned was making van deliveries for a wine merchant and Joanne was just about to go to commercial college. Aunt Bridie was in premature retirement, due to illness.

  As the eighties opened, this was a relatively stable and peaceful country family, established locally for generations, well respected, with active roots in the community.

  Kathleen was a member of Macra na Feirme, the young farmers’ organisation, and a member of CARE, a voluntary organisation that looked after the elderly and arranged annual outings for them. Maureen Moloney, wife of the local guard, was also in CARE. Kathleen babysat for her and her husband. Kathleen was a dedicated follower of the local hurling and football teams, travelling all over the county to watch them play. There was a friendly rivalry between her and Guard Moloney, who was a native of Cork city. When the Kerry and Cork teams should meet, Kathleen would shout ‘Up Kerry’ and Liam would shout ‘Up Cork’.

  Ned was even more passionate. He was secretary of the Abbeydorney branch of the GAA. Besides the football and hurling, he had personally set up a ladies’ football team. His pursuits patterned those of Uncle Maurice, after whom the local football pitch, Fuller Park, had been named, and like his late uncle he joined the Abbeydorney drama group. Ned would cram as many footballers as he could into Aunt Bridie’s car, drive the team to a match and finish off his evenings with a pint in the village, in the Silver Dollar pub. This was his world; he was a sociable fellow and he was content.

  Mike did not have a world beyond the farm. He had gone once to Killarney, twenty-five miles away, and once to Listowel, twelve miles away. Mike’s world was cows. Mike would talk about cows until the cows came home and had long gone to sleep. You would go to sleep yourself talking to Mike about cows, for he was slow of speech and of thought, and his brow would furrow with the effort of making up words and sentences. He was inclined to shy away with a physical start, like a nervous young animal, if any topic other than cows was introduced, but when he’d realise that the stranger’s intentions were friendly his brown eyes would clear, like the sky breaking through the clouds that constantly overhang Kerry, and he would give a delighted smile and try to reply. Eventually cows would be mentioned again, and then peace would come over him and finally conversation itself would lapse into a companionable silence, or you’d feel free to speak with whoever else was around and Mike wouldn’t mind at all. He’d go back into his own world. He produced third-class milk and he was very sweet to be around.

  Joanne’s world centred increasingly on Tralee, where she’d secured a job as receptionist in the sports complex. She’d work the shift until six or ten in the evening and then go for a drink with her new-found friends. Saturday nights always found her back in town, at a disco or in a pub.

  The family only ever had one bit of bother really, and that was discreetly handled. Ned mentioned to Guard Liam Moloney that Aunt Bridie had taken to driving while drinking. The family car belonged to her, though Ned and Mike were insured to drive it, and Ned didn’t feel he had the authority to stop the owner and eldest living member of the clan from doing as she wished. Liam Moloney handled the
matter with supreme tact. He rang Sister Aquinas, who was teaching infants at the convent school in Ballybunion, twenty miles away. Sister Aquinas sat down and wrote a letter to her younger sister Bridie. Bridie gave up driving the car.

  Aquinas was a regular visitor to the farm. She’d often stay overnight. Sometimes, though not often, because she was a nun and elderly now, she’d go with them all up into the bog to cut and foot the turf. They’d bring sandwiches and tea and work and talk in the sunshine. Joanne would join them on those summer days. For all its cosmopolitan delights, the one thing Tralee couldn’t offer you was a day up in the bog, and there were few pleasures in the world like it.

  Aunt Joan, the acerbic red-haired cosmopolitan of the family, had returned from London in 1969 in the year of Bridie’s controversial retirement from hospital. She had stayed on the farm, with the family, doing temporary jobs in Tralee hotels and then she got a job as a priest’s housekeeper in Newbridge, County Kildare, away over in the east near Dublin. She spent all her free time coming home to the farm. She’d come down at Easter, at Christmas, on the anniversary of her brother’s death every 20 June and for three weeks’ annual leave every September.

  When Aunts Joan and Aquinas couldn’t come home, they’d maintain contact every Friday by ringing Joanne at her workplace or receiving a call from her. She’d fill them in on family and local news. The calls would be short, perfunctory and friendly.

  In 1982 a couple of minor disasters and the makings of a major one struck the homestead. Kathleen was made redundant. Ned was made redundant. There was Mike’s small creamery cheque coming in during the summer months, Bridie’s pension and Mary Hayes’s widow’s pension, but Joanne was the only wage-earner in the family, bringing home eighty-eight pounds a week. This family was now relatively poor, living on dole and pension and a single woman’s wage. So were many other families. The recession was widespread.