Lest we forget: Three Anniversaries

2014 is the 30^th anniversary of two tragic events: the death in childbirth of 15-year-old Anne Lovett, and the infamous Kerry Babies Case. Both occurred in the shadow of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution which passed into law in January 1983 and placed the life of the unborn, from the moment of conception, on a par with the life of the mother.

 

Eileen Flynn

A third event – the decision by an unfair dismissals tribunal in February 1984, that the sacking of school teacher Eileen Flynn by Catholic secondary School in New Ross, Co. Wexford was not unfair – raised troubling questions about the condition of women in Irish society. Eileen had been sacked because she was pregnant, unmarried, and living with a separated man  and higher courts upheld the sacking the following year.  See  http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/1985/1.html

 

Anne Lovatt

On 31^st January 1984, on a moss-covered stone at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary outside Granard, Co. Longford in the Republic of Ireland, Anne Lovett lay dying alone beside her dead baby. Anne was moved to hospital, but did not survive. In a small town like Granard, although they initially claimed otherwise, it seems that everyone knew that Anne was pregnant: her family, her classmates, the teachers in the Convent of Mercy School, as well as the town folk. Nobody chose to intervene, not even the Gardai who should, by rights, have searched for the man or boy responsible for having sexual intercourse with an under-age schoolgirl. Nobody chose to intervene, it would seem, because to do so would interfere in family matters. After all, it is the family, not the individual, which is the basic unit of society enshrined in the Constitution of the Irish Republic.

 

The Kerry Babies

Thirty years ago in April, 1984, Joanne Hayes gave birth at the family farm in Abbeydorney, Co. Kerry, again in the Republic. The child did not survive. Joanne was unmarried and this was her third pregnancy. She was in a relationship with a married man who, being something of a stud, became known locally as ‘Shergar’ after the famous racehorse turned stud kidnapped in 1981 by masked men, said by some to be members of the IRA in pursuit of ransom. Joanne, of course, was not lauded for her fecundity but labelled ‘murdereress’ and ‘slut’ and a lot worse. She was charged with murder (later dropped) and forced to endure an 82-day all-male staffed Tribunal set up by the Irish state in the town of Tralee which took on the aura of the infamous witch trials in Salem, Alabama in 1692/3. If that wasn’t enough, Joanne was also charged with killing another baby with stab wounds to the heart which washed up on the beach near Caherciveen, Co. Kerry. Forensic evidence later found that Joanne was not the mother of the Caherciveen baby.  [Irish Times Journalist, Nell McCafferty wrote ‘A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case’  [ISBN 13: 978-1855942134], £9.50 PB.  Kindle £5.56.