Here's How – Here’s How 168

Ben Habib is one of the deputy leaders of Reform UK, the new name for The Brexit Party founded by Nigel Farage.

I misspoke during the interview, I wrongly said that Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar, was Jewish. I should have said that Edwin Montagu, the Liberal MP and Secretary for India, who did not support Dyre, was Jewish, and the resulting campaign against him by Conservative MPs (in support of Dyre) had a strong and explicit antisemitic element.

Ben’s claim that the then Brexit Party, for which he was an MEP, provided a majority of the non-white or ethnic minority members of the 2019 European Parliament doesn’t seem to be correct; a Reform Party spokesperson clarified that they meant that all British MEPs provided a majority of ethnic minority members of the EP. The EP told us that they don’t collect this information, but reporting here and here indicates that isn’t the case, and the Brexit Party had the lowest proportion of ethnic minorities among its MEPs, of all Britain-wide parties although that isn’t a really valid comparison given the small numbers involved.

Notwithstanding all that, I think Ben’s wider point is valid, that while it is imperfect like any country, the UK has a relatively good record on race relations compared to many continental European countries.

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John will be 40 next April, or he would be, if he lived. But he didn’t.

He died.

He died of 28 stab wounds, which he suffered shortly after his birth in 1984. Neither John’s parents nor his murderer have ever been identified, though we can guess that there may be some overlap there given that, a short time later, his newborn body, partially decomposed, was washed ashore, with 28 stab wounds, near Cahersiveen.

But the fact that his parents and/or murderers were never identified didn’t stop some people from jumping to conclusions.

At about the same time, 80 km to the north-east in Abbeydorney, also in Kerry, there was a woman who had what was known at the time – this was the 1980s – she had a reputation.

What that meant was she came from a poor farming family, they didn’t have much education, and she had a boyfriend. Who was married. To someone else. That sort of thing that would get you a reputation in rural Ireland at the time, and not a reputation that would do you any good.

It certainly didn’t do Joanne Hayes any good and, when it was observed locally that she was pregnant, I think we can conclude that congratulations and best wishes were not the first things that came to the minds, or the lips, of many of her neighbours.

When it was evident that Joanne was no longer pregnant, and there was no sign of a baby, that surely drew attention. When the John’s tiny, murdered body was washed ashore, 80 km down the coast, it was probably reasonable to ask questions. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing. The gardaí arrested Joanne and her entire family.

What happened when they were arrested is disputed, but what can’t be disputed are the confessions that the entire family signed, very strange confessions, which implicated every member of the family in stabbing John to death and disposing of his body in the sea.

That was my first draft of that paragraph. Yes, what happened when the whole family was disputed, but disputed or not, that doesn’t stop it from being blindingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of intelligence. The family were battered or bullied or browbeaten into making false confessions, containing details that could only be known to the murderers, and the investigating gardaí.

Joanne Hayes was charged with murder.

The family promptly withdrew their confessions, saying that they had been threatened, coerced, harassed, physically intimidated, and assaulted into making false confessions. Joanne Hayes said that she had given birth at home, her baby had died shortly after birth. Not surprising – neither mother nor child had any pre- or post-natal care. She said her baby had been buried on their farm.

The farm was searched, and her baby was found and exhumed.

Since the Hayes family had nothing to do with the murdered baby, the only way that details of that murder could have found their way into the false confessions is if they were supplied by the interrogators. On their face, the confessions were dubious, the confessions go out of their way to clarify that every member of the family went out of their way to have a hand in the murder; a murder they had nothing to do with.

But with the body of Joanne’s baby now found, the confessions went from being dubious to being clearly fabricated. And any investigator with an ounce of intelligence could not have helped but know that they were fabricated.

The gardaí now had the bodies of two babies, hence the name of the case – the Kerry Babies case. Babies – plural, not possessive. And they had the confessions of a whole family to a murder that they didn’t commit, containing details that they therefore couldn’t have known.

The murder case was thrown out by the judge – he had little other choice – but the way that official Ireland swung to the defence of its representatives is what is really remarkable about this case. The trial judge threw out the murder charge against Joanne Hayes without hesitation, but the behaviour of the next judge to look at the case was breathtaking.

There was a tribunal of inquiry into the case, conducted by Mr Justice Kevin Lynch. The gardaí involved were represented by high-powered legal representatives, at the taxpayers’ expense.

Days on end were spent discussing the ludicrous theory that Johanna Hayes had ovulated two eggs, had sex with two different men during a short period of time, and became pregnant with twins, one fathered by her boyfriend, the other fathered by another unknown male.

There wasn’t a shred of evidence to support this theory; its sole purpose was to try to keep alive the possibility that Joanne had given birth to – and then murdered – both babies. The fact that the deaths and the disposal of the bodies of both babies had almost nothing in common should have told anyone that there was no likely connection between the two. Even putting that aside, though DNA tests were not available at the time, blood type tests showed that the babies could not have had the same father, so the vanishingly rare possibility of superfecundation was brought up.

It’s blindingly obvious that the reason this convoluted nonsense was dreamt up solely to avoid the blinding obvious conclusion that the Hayes family confessions were coerced. The lawyers representing gardaí were hearing hooves and not so much thinking zebras, they were insisting that it was unicorns.

However hard their lawyers worked to shield the gardaí from the consequences of their misdeeds, tribunal chairman Justice Kevin Lynch worked far harder. Firstly, he found in his report that Joanne killed her own baby – the one buried on the farm – by choking it to death to stop it crying. Not only was there no medical evidence to support this finding, it flatly contradicted the evidence of the then state pathologist Dr John Harbison, who said he was not able to determine the cause of death. Judge Lynch literally pulled it out of his … wig.

He also rejected the Hayes family evidence that they were assaulted, threatened and coerced into making false confessions, but as Gene Kerrigan later wrote, he never “convincingly explained how people who were entirely innocent of any involvement whatever in stabbing a baby should make very detailed confessions that fitted into the facts of the baby found on the beach”.

Kevin Lynch was later appointed to the Supreme Court.

But it didn’t end there. Joanne Hayes co-wrote a book called My Story, but four of the gardaí involved in the case sued pretty much everyone involved in that book, and received a £100,000, a vast sum at the time.

One of those gardaí who was ‘compensated’ was Superintendent Joe Shelley. By an astonishing coincidence, Superintendent Shelley was later transferred to Raphoe, Co Donegal, and in 1996 he was a key member of the garda team in the notorious investigation of the death of cattle dealer Richie Barron, which led to another tribunal of enquiry, which didn’t have such a pleasing outcome for Shelley. The report from Justice Morris said that he bore responsibility for the, quote, “prejudiced, tendentious and utterly negligent” investigation of Richie Barron’s death.

Four years later, the now-promoted Detective Superintendent Shelley was stationed in the midlands where he was the scene commander who called in armed gardaí to lay siege to home the of a mentally ill man, John Carthy. John Carthy was shot dead by gardaí at the scene, in an incident that led to yet another tribunal, which also made detailed criticisms of garda actions on the day.

The Hayes family were paid substantial damages in 2020, and received an apology from the government, arising out of the unfounded findings made by the tribunal of inquiry in the 1980s, just a few months after Justice Kevin Lynch died.

The identity of John, who would have been forty next April, has never been established.