Thirty nine years ago, the body of a five day old infant baby – later christened “baby John” washed up on the Kerry beach pictured above. And that is pretty much how the facts of the matter are presented, to this day – that a body “washed up on a beach”, and resulted in a Garda investigation that was infamously savage and botched, and caused infamous hurt to a family that was entirely unconnected to the case. The bizarre claims made in the original investigation – that Joanne Hayes had become simultaneously pregnant by two different men, for example – have entered with some justification into the lore of Ireland’s dark and cruel past, and are held up as an example how far we have come.
And yet there is another side to this story, entirely separate from Joanne Hayes and her family. That story is that thirty nine years ago, somebody – or somebodies – stabbed a five day old baby twenty eight times, including several times through the heart. The baby’s neck was also broken. The infant baby did not simply “wash up on a beach”. It was brutally murdered, and, by the looks of things, thrown into the sea.
This past week, there has been some media disquiet about the fact that the Gardai are making arrests, and questioning people on suspicion of their involvement. The solicitor for the people arrested is bound by ethics and law to deliver the best possible defence for his clients, whose innocence in the matter must be presumed. He has wasted no time in doing so. The Independent outlined some of his comments this weekend, and the following stood out:
“Mr O’Connell said the treatment of his clients in terms of the “breaches of privacy” and the attention focused on the case was “not dissimilar to the treatment of Joanne Hayes in 1984”.
From a public relations perspective, linking the fresh investigation into the death of “baby John” to the horrible treatment of Joanne Hayes is good practice. But it is also an overt and obvious attempt at misdirection: The cases are referred to as “the Kerry babies” but the cases of the two babies involved are very different. The baby that was born to Joanne Hayes died, but there was no evidence of foul play, and indeed the baby was buried by its family. The baby found on the beach was stabbed to death, 28 times.
It is perhaps too often ignored that the fact that Joanne Hayes and her family were falsely accused of murder also means that somebody else, for almost four decades, has gotten away with murder. The people or persons who stabbed baby John to death were content to sit quietly and watch the original farce: They were content to watch Joanne Hayes and her family go through years of torture, garda brutality, and cruelty. They were content to watch this case play out in the national media and in the eyes of the country, and sit quietly letting others wrongly take the rap. And, by the way, whoever they are, they also stabbed an infant to death.
The Gardai, for all the criticism they have rightly taken for the botch job they made of the original investigation, are entirely correct to not let this matter drop. The baby found on the beach in Caherciveen was given an awful, cruel, and unhuman death and the person or persons responsible are therefore capable of awful, cruel, and unhuman behaviour. They committed a crime which shocked the nation to its core, and provoked a search for answers that led to the misguided persecution of the Hayes family.
There will, of course, be those who try to twist the death of the baby on the beach into some kind of commentary on the state of Ireland in 1984. On that note, I might write personally: I was born in March of that year, within just a few weeks of the baby at the centre of this case. Had “baby John” lived, he would be thirty nine years old. As someone of the same age, I think it important to set the record straight: Yes, there was a culture of shame around teenage or unmarried pregnancy, and yes there was widespread judgmental attitudes. It was not an easy country in which to be a “fallen woman”.
And yet, neither Baby John nor I were born into an Ireland where it was in any way expected that it was preferable to kill a child than to have one out of wedlock, or in any other kind of shameful circumstances. There is no “societal guilt” in this case: An infant baby was stabbed to death, and you don’t get, in my view, to blame Ireland’s repressive sexual culture for that crime. Thousands of other babies were born out of wedlock, or in less than approved circumstances, in the Ireland of 1984. Those children may not always have had easy lives – but they had lives, and nobody would have denied their right to those lives.
The kind of person who murders a baby to avoid “shame” – if (and we are speculating) that was the reason – was not compelled by society to do it. That is a lie, and it is one which we have become rather too comfortable with. Instead, a murder of the most shocking kind was committed, and while the motives may provide some mitigation at trial, that trial should still be held, if possible. And the person or persons who committed it, even if they have skated their punishment for forty years, should receive the same treatment that anyone who committed such a crime today would receive.