Joanne Hayes

We should tell it to new Irish citizens, so they know about the Ireland some would like to bury.

And what is the truth of what happened to “baby John”? When our thoughts turn to “baby John” and the circumstances of his death, whatever they turn out to be, it may require some radical compassion. And she was so sick on the stand that she had to be sedated ... If that truth emerges we should consider the treatment of Joanne Hayes as a deeply cautionary tale. At one point Hayes had to take a break to vomit before returning to the witness box, where the verbal probing continued. A tribunal of inquiry known as the Kerry Babies Tribunal was established to investigate. In May 1984, some weeks after the dead body of “baby John” was found, gardaí discovered that around the same time a single woman called Joanne Hayes had given birth to a baby who was stillborn or died shortly after birth. “They were slavering in court,” Nell McCafferty has said, recounting the experience of covering the tribunal. This theory was aimed at explaining the different blood groups of the two babies. Tasked with getting at the truth of the Garda investigation, the tribunal was described by the late poet Brendan Kennelly as “a medieval witch hunt with the victims burning at the stake and the crowd dancing around the fire”. She was interrogated about intimate details that were of no relevance to a crime everybody present was fully aware she had not committed. The newborn boy was discovered wedged in a rock with a broken neck and 28 stab wounds all over his tiny body.