It must have taken extraordinary courage for Jacqueline Connolly to write her “shocking and haunting” book, Deadly Silence, which attempts to uncover the truth about what happened when Alan Hawe violently murdered his beautiful wife, Clodagh, and their three young children Liam (13), Niall (11) and Ryan (6) one fatal Sunday evening in 2016.
The horrifying nature of their murders left the country reeling, and urged a focus on the victims of such evil crime, rather than the perpetrators. Clodagh’s sister, Jacqueline, and her mother Mary Coll, had always rejected expert medical evidence given at the inquest into the deaths that Alan Hawe was suffering from depression and psychosis.
Instead, they argued, Alan Hawe – a deputy school principal and a man very much involved in the local community – believed he was about to ‘fall from grace’ because he had developed an obsession with pornography, and had apparently been caught masturbating and watching pornography.
They did not want the savagery Alan Hawe had meted out to Clodagh and their three young boys to be explained away by an undiagnosed mental illness: by deranged actions driven by psychosis. Hawe’s action were evil and a result of his controlling nature, they believed.
I think they are correct, and the distinction they are making is an important one, not just for Clodagh’s family, but for our understanding of how these appalling murders take place – not that we may ever fully understand what can bring a human being to commit such acts, to be honest, but it is better to face such terrible evil than to mark it down as being simply inexplicable.
But that can’t have been easy. At times, Jacqueline Connolly must have felt exhausted from the distress of the effort required to tell this devastating, shocking, heartbreaking story. She had to go to a “very dark place to think about what he did”, she said. And she had already been through her own previous agonies: the death of her brother Tadhg, who she adored, by suicide, and then her beloved husband Richie to the same just three years later.
She told the Irish Times that she “found there is a stigma attached to grief. There is a stigma attached to how you’ve had your losses”. That is an extraordinarily astute insight. No-one means to be unkind, but the palpable unease around violent or unusually traumatic deaths must be wounding at times for those most injured by such grievous loss.
For those left behind, the trauma of knowing the terror that was endured by people they deeply loved in their final moments before they were murdered may never heal. Jacqueline wrote that Alan Hawe using an axe and a knife “killed Clodagh as if he hated her, murdering her with savagery”.
Liam and Niall tried to fight back, two young boys left with defensive wounds and signs of struggle, after their own father attacked them with a knife. Little Ryan, just six years old, was similarly shown no mercy. Alan Hawe had clearly thought this through. Each child was killed, the inquest heard, in a way that ensured they could not cry out or warn each other. This was planned – the result of “meticulous planning”, it seems, not a frenzy of rage or the actions of a berserk man. That was evil.
Jacqueline also revealed that the family had learned from a Serious Crime Review of the case – a review only won by the hard-fought public attention the family brought to the issue – the extent of Alan Hawe’s controlling nature, and of his depravity.
She was shocked to learn that her text messages to her Clodagh had all been forwarded by her sister to Hawe, though she says she always felt he tried to create a wedge between the two sisters. One investigator told her that Hawe saw her as a threat.
We now also know that Alan Hawe had a pornography obsession, and used a secret phone to access pornography – including images involving children. He feared that this would come out – something he referred to in his suicide note, though I’d contend that in such cases it is pride rather than shame which leads to such a violent reaction.
Hawe was proud of his reputation as an important man in the community: it was his pride, his obsession with control and with being held in esteem, that seemingly ballooned in his distorted thinking to somehow justifying his heinous, murderous acts.
With bullies and those who practise coercive control, someone else is always to blame. For such psychopaths, if their depravity is to be found out, if public appropriation is to be felt, others – even the innocent – must be also punished.
Was the pornography obsession part of that distorted thinking? We don’t talk enough about the effect of porn on already disordered minds, about the prevalence of violence against women in what is being consumed by some men on a daily basis, about the depiction of women as objects to be used, violated and abused.
Last year, Women’s Aid launched new research that it said found the consumption of mainstream pornography is fuelling high levels of violence against and degradation of women and girls.
Report finds that pornography that features the strangling of women during sex, verbally degrading them and spitting in their faces, among countless other acts of callousness and cruelty is now mainstream and freely available to everyone, including children, with a few clicks online.
Researchers have found that much mainstream pornography depicts high levels of sexual and physical aggression against women which actively distorts and breaks the boundary between ‘sex’ and ‘sexual violence’.
The effect of watching that kind of pornography can only be that women are dehumanised. But its my view that it may also be leading to an alarming hatred of women, because it distorts the reality of what male-female interactions and relationships should be. Research carried out by the British government found that “there is substantial evidence of an association between the use of pornography and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women”.
A systematic review published in 2023 found that the impact extended beyond sexual violence, saying “an association between pornography use and nonsexual violence seems to exist, although the causality of this association remains unclear.” Perhaps the causality is that when women are objectified every day in the mind of a porn consumer, it becomes much easier to attack, stab, strangle, kill an object rather than a human being.
Jennifer Connolly says that the note left by Hawe – really a 1,000 word letter which focused on his feelings – revealed that he enjoyed the brutal death he meted out to Clodagh and her children. Such psychopathy is terrifying, especially given the apparent normality of the family prior to the murders, though as Clodagh’s sister points out, Alan Hawe was, in fact, not what he seemed.
Her search for answers has highlighted many areas where the system must do better in terms of communicating and assisting the traumatised families left behind after such a unspeakable act of violence. Perhaps it might also prompt a wider consideration of the corrosive and harmful effect of pornography, especially on already disordered minds?