A 52 year old man from County Clare who died at the weekend had his funeral mass yesterday morning.
At the mass, Joe Collins’ life was celebrated, alongside the life of his wife, Claire Collins, who Gardai believe was murdered by her husband, before he took his own life. According to multiple media outlets, they believe he smothered her, and then killed himself.
Despite this, her coffin was right there in the church, alongside his. He was cremated, alongside her. Photos showed their hearses travelling, together.
Ireland is not short, sadly, of husbands who have murdered their wives. Joe O’Reilly, who murdered his wife Rachel, went on the Late Late Show to appeal for public help in locating her killer. William Eagers is presently serving a life sentence for murdering his wife Jean with a Samurai Sword. In Northern Ireland, Thomas Rainey murdered his wife Katrina by setting her on fire. There are many more. What those people have in common is that their names are associated with public revulsion. When they die, there will not be big funerals for them in which they are remembered as loving husbands.
It is, obviously, not possible, thankfully, for most people to know for sure how they would react if they discovered that their father or grandfather murdered their mother or grandmother before taking his own life. That is the kind of grief and suffering that most of us will be privileged never to know. As such, we should be careful in criticising those who are enduring it for the decisions they make. After all, in such cases, the murderer was as much a member of their family as the victim.
That said, there’s a problem: If Joe Collins had killed his wife and then simply turned himself into the Gardai, the reaction to his actions would have been much different. There would have been no praise for him from members of the local community. There would have been no prayers for him at his victim’s funeral. The grief and “lack of understanding” described by the Priest at his funeral would have been replaced with anger, and a hunger for justice for his victim.
On August 29th, 2016, Alan Hawe, a teacher from County Cavan, brutally murdered his three children and his wife. He then took his own life.
Like Joe Collins, the coverage of Hawe in the immediate aftermath bordered on the grotesque. As the Guardian reminds us:
In the aftermath of the deaths, some Irish news organisations focused on Hawe’s reputation as a pillar of the community, with some reports asking what drove the 41-year-old to kill himself as well as his entire family.
Hawe stabbed his wife, Clodagh, and sons Liam, 13, Niall 11, and Ryan, six, then hanged himself. According to some reports, he left a suicide note saying his family could not cope without him.
Women’s Aid in Ireland, which works with the victims of domestic violence, said people were “rushing in with excuses” over what Hawe did.
Margaret Martin, the group’s director, said: “It is very clear he was a murderer, that is fairly conclusive. Does committing suicide mitigate you killing other people before that act? If he went into a school and killed staff and students before killing himself what would we say? We have to stop the denial here.”
In the immediate aftermath of the deaths, Hawe was buried alongside the family whose lives he had stolen. Only later, when the full enormity of what he had done was considered, was his body exhumed and buried elsewhere.
There is an obvious difficulty in such situations: Nobody, presumably, wants to tell a grieving family at such a time how, precisely, they should grieve. From Priest to funeral director to neighbour, there is an Irish unwillingness to approach a person in a state of emotional distress and suggest to them that perhaps a course of action is inappropriate, given the circumstances in which one of those who has died has met their end. In the aftermath of the Hawe fiasco, the family of his victims said, in essence, that in the shock and distress of what had happened, they were not thinking clearly. And nobody, apparently, had the courage to help them.
All of this adds up to a morbid incentive, unfortunately. Murder-suicides are treated differently to murders in general. They are treated differently by the media, by the local community, and the church, and even the family of the victims on which they are perpetrated.
We are told, as media outlets, in our coverage of suicides not to glorify suicide, or even to report on it where possible lest our doing so might encourage vulnerable people to take their lives through the normalization of such a practice. That is probably the correct approach. But when it comes to murder-suicides, Irish society tends to do exactly that: We are providing a mechanism for a vengeful husband to kill his wife and family, and be buried as a loving husband nevertheless. Why don’t the same principles apply?
What happened in Clare yesterday was a mistake. Saying so might upset a grieving family, which is not the intention of this piece. But even if that is the cost, it needs to be said anyway. There’s a reason these crimes are on the rise.