Events
On 14 April 1984, a newborn baby boy was found stabbed to death on White Strand beach at Cahirciveen, County Kerry. A local woman, Joanne Hayes from Abbeydorney, who was known to have been pregnant, was arrested and she and her family confessed to the murder of the baby. However, they later withdrew their confessions and admitted instead that Hayes's baby had been born on the family farm, had died shortly after birth, and had been wrapped in a plastic bag and buried on the farm in secret. Tests showed that the baby whose body was found on the farm had the same blood type – A – as Hayes and its (married) father, Jeremiah Locke. However, the baby on the beach had blood group O. The Gardaí nevertheless insisted that Hayes had become pregnant simultaneously by two different men (through heteropaternal superfecundation) and had given birth to both children, killing the one found on the beach. Another theory put forward was that the baby's blood type had changed due to decomposition.
Hayes was charged with murder but the charge was thrown out by a judge, and the Kerry Babies Tribunal, headed by Mr Justice Kevin Lynch, was set up to investigate the behaviour of the gardaí in the case. Judge Lynch found that Joanne Hayes murdered the baby on the farm by choking it to stop it crying, in spite of state pathologist Dr John Harbison being unable to determine the cause of death. The judge rejected claims by the Hayes family that they had been assaulted by gardaí, or that the confessions were obtained through coercion. The report of the Tribunal did not explain how Joanne Hayes and her family came to make confessions containing identical details of events that never happened.
Read more about this topic: Kerry Babies Tribunal
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this theme were plentiful during that phase of preparation and on the whole were fruitless. My experience is that discussion is fruitless. What sets forth and demonstrates is the sight of events in action, is living through these events and understanding them.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)