Listowel – echo’s of the dark days of the 1980’s and the Kerry babies

Bishops hid priests who raped childrenI was half listening to the radio at breakfast this morning when some priest came on to defend a handshake. Which sounded strange so I started to pay attention. And suddenly found myself back in the dark days of Ireland of the 1980’s. The story on the news was simple if a little unbelievable. The previous day, Danny Foley, a nightclub bouncer had been sentenced for a sexual assault outside the club in Listowel where he worked. He’d been caught lying to the court and there was even CCTV evidence of his guilt. The Judge noted that "little or no remorse had been shown, nor any apology given to the victim" yet on conviction at least 40 or 50 men including the local priest had lined up to shake his hand.

 

Bishops hid priests who raped childrenI was half listening to the radio at breakfast this morning when some priest came on to defend a handshake. Which sounded strange so I started to pay attention. And suddenly found myself back in the dark days of Ireland of the 1980’s. The story on the news was simple if a little unbelievable. The previous day, Danny Foley, a nightclub bouncer had been sentenced for a sexual assault outside the club in Listowel where he worked. He’d been caught lying to the court and there was even CCTV evidence of his guilt. The Judge noted that "little or no remorse had been shown, nor any apology given to the victim" yet on conviction at least 40 or 50 men including the local priest had lined up to shake his hand.

 

Listowel is about 10km from the village of Abbeydoney. In April 1984, after the body of a baby had been found on a beach over 30km away, a woman called Joanne Hayes from Abbeydoney was arrested. Back then there was a unit within the Gardai known as the ‘Heavy Gang’ for their methods in extracting confessions, they were sent down and soon enough they had ‘convinced’ the entire family (Joanne Hayes, her three siblings, aunt and mother) to confess to the murder. Joanne had been pregnant but the neat case that the Gardai had terrorised out of the family fell apart when it emerged that Joanne had given birth in secret, the baby had died shortly afterwards and was buried on the family farm. The blood type of the farm baby matched Joanne’s and the father, that of the beach baby did not.

The Gardai came up with various bizarre theories to explain this but the Heavy Gang was disbanded and four of them assigned to desk duty. One of them Superintendent Joe Shelley ended up in two other tribunals because of his role in the “prejudiced, tendentious and utterly negligent” inquiry into the death of Raphoe cattle dealer, Richie Barron in 1996 and because he was scene commander in Abbeylara in April 2000 when Gardai shot John Carthy, a mentally disturbed man, dead.

Reports of the ‘Kerry Babies’ case filled the papers for months. One obvious angle was the story of the Gardai investigation and the exposure and eventual dissolution of the Heavy Gang, a somewhat satisfactory conclusion. But the other was the way Joanne was talked about and indeed attacked. The father of the farm baby was a married man called Jeremiah Locke and Joanne was an unmarried mother. The subsequent Kerry Babies Tribunal essentially put Joanne on trial for her sexual history, using this to avoid ruling on the family claims that the confessions had been beaten out of them. The one positive thing to be said is that they did have the support of many of their neighbors.

1984 also saw the death of 15-year-old schoolgirl Ann Lovett. She was also pregnant, a fact supposedly no one was aware of, (her GP later suggest this was not that unusual in Granard). After school on January 31st 1984 she went to a local Virgin Mary grotto where she gave birth and where both Ann and the baby died.  Christy Moore has a song about the death of Ann Lovett called "Everyone knew, Nobody said" that expresses the reality of what happened that day in Granard.

The year previously the catholic right had forced through an anti-abortion referendum (abortion was already illegal, the referendum made it harder to change the law) and in 1986 they successfully defeated an attempt to introduce a very limited form of divorce. At the time sex between men was illegal and only married couples with a doctors prescription could legally access contraception. The fact that priests were physically abusing children, including sexual assault was widely known although nothing was done about it beyond people marking dark jokes about keeping your kids away from priests.

The Magdalene Laundries were still in operation; these were essentially hard labour prisons for unmarried and other ‘fallen’ women. By the 80’s the Gardai had stopped forcibly returning women who had escaped from them (something with no basis in law) but this had happened into the 1970’s. It was only with the discovery of the bodies of 155 women in the grounds of one of these grim places in 1993 that a public outcry began. This happened in turn in the aftermath of the X-case when in 1992 the government had attempted to intern a 14 year old rape survivor who wanted to go to England for an abortion. This was the moment at which the silence was broken as thousands of people took part in demonstrations in Dublin including a 15,000 strong demonstration organised by a tiny group of us. There followed a rapid period of transformation in which almost all of the crap above was overturned except for the ban on abortion, by 1995 there was even a successful divorce referendum. The picture at the top of this article is of a WSM poster at a counter demonstration to a large anti Divorce march organised by the catholic right in 1995.  The priest pictured on the poster is the notorious child rapist Brendan Smyth.

Migration out of Ireland in the 1980’s was largely economic, tens of thousands of people left every year. But the bright side to getting out was escaping the sexually repressive and hypocritical dark hell that decades of de facto religious rule on social issues had brought. This was a religious regime that left everyone raised under it with mental scars that we continue to carry in our lives and relationships to this day. For some people this was the main or perhaps real reason for leaving Ireland back then, this is somewhat reflected in the last verse of the Phil Chevron song migration song ‘Thousands are sailing’

Where e’er we go, we celebrate

The land that makes us refugees

From fear of Priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies

I was at a Pogues concert a couple of weeks back when Phil sung this and I remember wondering how much of the crowd would find themselves emigrating for economic reasons in the months ahead. I was working off the presumption that the dark sexual repression of the 80’s was in the past. It’s hard to explain just how bad that felt at the time but events in Listowel bring back something of how it felt. As I write this the aunt of the survivor in the Listowel case has revealed on national radio that the survivor has been refused service in shops in Listowel. She has been repeatedly subject to people stopping her on the street to demand if she is ‘sorry for what she has done.’ The aunt reckons this sort of attitude is widespread in the town.

If you are not familiar with Ireland or similar situations elsewhere the connection between the events to the 80’s and Listowel today may not seem obvious. The connection is that it is the repression of that sort of sick society that makes these sort of assaults acceptable, providing the assaulter can pose as an upstanding member of the community.  The assumption is then that the survivor is to blame.

Priests could get away with raping children because the repression of Irish society of that period meant that if the child talked they would firstly not be believed and secondly the child would be blamed. The priests were ‘pillars of the community’ those they abused were most often the children of the poor.  In many of the testimonies of the survivors of those attacks the children say that at the time they even blamed themselves. From what’s been reported from Listowel this is the logic of those who qued up to shake Foley’s hand. They could hardly believe he is innocent as he is on CCTV carrying the young women to the skip where he assaulted her. Yet Father Sheehy describes Foley as an "even tempered, placid individual." The clear suggestion being made is that the assault is somehow the survivor’s fault.

It’s all profoundly depressing and perhaps a needed reminder that years of progress can be reversed and swept away if the gains are not guarded and fought for. Between this and the supposed sighting of the Virgin Mary in the sun at Knock I can’t help but wonder if the recession is going to be a time when many of the social gains of the boom will also be swept away. In any case given the national publicity created by the disgraceful 50 it will be interesting to see if what I’d hope are the decent majority in Listowel will make their voices heard and come out in support of the survivor who had the courage to press through with the case despite all the scumbaggery we have now heard about.


 Some quotes from the priest on Newstalk
Irish Times: Dozens sympathise with sex offender