The Kerry Babies Case

I agree and I was early 20s those years and certainly would not have liked to have had to face my mother with that news! I lived in rural Ireland and I definitely did not know any single mothers at that time around my age in the locality, plenty of hasty marriages arranged though!

I didn’t imply Joanne Hayes was in receipt of unmarried mothers allowance but over 10,000 women in 1984 were in receipt of unmarried mothers allowance-so the idea that she was driven to conceal her third pregnancy for social reasons is nonsensical. Even more anachronistic and absurd are the constant claims that the savage murder of baby John was somehow mitigated by the social opprobrium attaching unmarried mothers in Ireland in 1984.

And I am saying the exact opposite about the fact that Joanne Hayes had a 2 year-old daughter - this fact was well known to everyone in the local community and was stated frequently at the tribunal and in the tribunal report, but this highly salient fact is rarely mentioned and never really explored in the vast literature on this scandal. Can you guess why?

highly salient fact is rarely mentioned and never really explored in the vast literature on this scandal.

Curious, why do you think it’s never mentioned?

Au contraire, I'm too old to accept the myth that women in Ireland in the 1980s were treated like in the 1950s. Equally, I know that the 1980s were a low point in Irish history, with a reversion to mass emigration of young women and men, including many of our best and brightest, as the economy stagnated and violence in the North seemed insoluble.

The Kerry Babies fiasco fed into the sense of national dysfunction at that time and it would be terrible if the parents, having at last been identified by DNA, said nothing and faced no consequences.

I have never heard any explanation. I can't imagine anyone thinks it irrelevant that Joanne Hayes had a two-year old daughter living with her on the family farm.

Here's what I have learned - the media and academics are rarely neutral (many don't even pretend to be, some even believe that no one can be).

When was the last time you read an opinion piece which said "I used to believe X but the new data shows I was wrong"? (Not one of those bait and switch pieces "I was wrong…..the truth is even more X than I thought).

If you want to find their biases, look for what is left unsaid or minimised. Eamon Ryan's response to the ESRI report on retrofitting was a classic - he simply ignored the two key take-aways.

The Irish media played a very large role in the Kerry Babies fiasco and (as usual) has failed to come clean about its failures, even when forking out large defamation payments and shredding thousands of books.

Id say that the answer to your question is at most, probably 2 people in Caherciveen.

Maybe your experience of the 1980s was different to mine. I was a teenager in the ‘80s and I personally know 2 girls who concealed pregnancies at that time. One girl went into labour when on their summer holidays with her family, and the other girls parents discovered the pregnancy fairly late on and threw her out of the house. So I don’t think it’s a myth that you need to dispel. It wasn’t quite the 50s with the parish priest beating a path to the laundries, but there was a good degree of fear and many families had very conservative views.
The Gardaí may only have found one such case in Kerry, but the only reason we know they missed baby John was that he was murdered. They might well have missed others. They will also have missed girls who ‘went away’ to have their babies. But we know they missed at least 50%. And if it weren’t for baby John, Joanne Hayes child would probably not have been discovered either.

We are reduced to anecdotal evidence about the number of concealed pregnancies. I have no doubt that there were, and still are, teenage pregnancies that are concealed even today when most end in abortion.

But that's not the case with Joanne Hayes. She didn't hide her previous pregnancies and her daughter lived with her on the family farm without no adverse effects. But no one in the media wants to consider why then she went to such lengths to hide her pregnancy in 1984 and, disastrously, lied to the Gardaí about it. We have absurd comments here that she didn't get medical assistance because "it's what happened for millennia". As if Kerry in the 1980s was still in the stone age.

As for Baby John, the parents have made no such claim or offered any explanation so I deplore the baseless speculation (by others) which seeks to mitigate his murder on the grounds of a social taboo which no longer had any real force in the mid-1980s.

I may be completely mistaken here, but I was under the impression that J Hayes baby was stillborn (I know this wasn't categorically said by the pathologist but seems the likeliest scenario), and that a doctor had previously examined her, that is how the gardai were able to identify her. She may have been hiding her pregnancy somewhat but it doesn't sound it was being concealed from everyone. There are many cases where people have had late miscarriages or still births in their own home.

To be honest, I kind of feel we should be discussing this case without including J Hayes in any case. She was a victim of a botched investigation, and nothing to do with baby John in the end. Whatever was going on in her personal life can be a personal matter as far as I'm concerned.

As for single mothers, although things had improved a fair bit, there was certainly still a very strong stigma in the county, and especially in more rural areas, however I do agree, we really have no indication of what occurred at all, and the speculation is pretty rampant. Some people are imply the mother was underage etc. with no evidence of that in the public record.

It's also possible that baby John's father never knew about his birth .

I really hope the truth is uncovered. Such a horrific death for a tiny baby. Anyone who was aware of the real story and allowed Joanne and her family to go through their horrific ordeal should be also brought to justice, all done to avoid bringing 'shame' on the family imo.