Kow wrote:

You're not allowed to call it wine. It's grape flavoured alcohol.

Wasn't it formally Lilt?

Facewon wrote:

Melbournites of forum United in grief.

https://youtu.be/6aTO6Iv4f3A?si=LdZG0KDR0hZcFBdB

Franko Cozzo. Gone to the grand sale in the sky.

I missed this. In Barunsweek an Footscray

An influential voice for me certainly. Did a lot of great work.

Gerry O Carroll, 80 something.


Now, this isn’t a name that will mean anything to any of you from outside of Ireland, and probably not much to those who didn’t grow up there in the 80s. But this man, a police officer, is probably the central character in one of the events that dragged Ireland, literally screaming, into the modern age. It’s a story that’s imprinted into me, as I lived very close to the area, and it had a huge impact on everyone at the time, delivering mortal blows to the church, the police, the justice system et al. I don’t usually write much on anything but I’m going to let myself vent a little here, as the story provokes a very intense emotional response in me. So I'm really writing for my own benefit, feel free to stop reading anytime you like.


In April 1984, a man walking out on the beach in Caherciveen, Co. Kerry, an idyllic and sleepy village on the coast, came across a newborn baby, dead. The baby had a broken neck and had been stabbed 28 times. This alone was enough to traumatise the area, it wasn’t a place where things happened. The police, led by the above mentioned Gerry O Carroll, were called in of course, and pretty soon they had zeroed in on another sleepy village some 80km away, Abbeydorney, where a woman named Joanna Hayes lived with her family. It was known that Joanna had been pregnant. But now she wasn’t. The police moved swiftly, investigated and quickly extracted confessions from Joanna and her entire family. They had murdered the baby and travelled to Caherciveen to dispose of the body. Case closed, the officers had done a sterling job and everyone could rest easy.


Except no.


What had apparently transpired was really only explicable by understanding how society and its institutions were still completely in the thrall of the church, its fingers infiltrating at every level. The father of Joanna’s baby was not her husband, but rather another married man. There being no contraception or abortion in Ireland in the 80s really meant that you had few options other than to carry the baby to term and then get rid of it somehow. Adoption maybe, abandon the baby on the convent steps. It was either that or the slow death of endless shame that would go with you to your grave. So the explanation was that she had tried to hide her pregnancy, but had failed, and finally had murdered the baby in order to try to hide her shame. A reasonable solution.


Except no.


Joanna quickly recanted her confession and claimed that the baby had been stillborn and she had buried it herself on their own farmland outside the very house where the police were questioning her. Officer O Carroll and his squad refused to believe her and refused even to search as obviously it was an open and shut case. Why would they bother? Eventually, they were pressured into searching, and lo and behold, they found a newborn baby, exactly where she had said. So now they had two dead babies. Logically then, the first baby was a different case and Joanna would be investigated for the second.


Except no.


Officer O Carroll decided that Joanna had had twins. As a sociopath she had murdered both of them. He decided that she had strangled both of them, but the first one she had decided to stab 28 times as well and then travel 80 kilometres to dispose of just that body, keeping the other one outside her house. The father of the babies, Jeremiah Locke, would have been in on it too and would have aided in both the murders and the disposal of the bodies. Plausible. Until blood tests revealed that the first baby’s blood group was different and Locke could not have been the father. It was a different baby and could not be connected to Joanna or Jeremiah.

 

Except no.


Officer O Carroll at this point hit upon a variety of theories. Some were dismissed relatively quickly (but not immediately) such as the possibility that the first pregnancy had actually been a virgin conception, which had happened at almost the same time as the other, more normal conception. This was considered in the media for a while. Then he hit on a much better theory – Joanna had actually had sex with two different men at around more or less the same time and both had almost miraculously impregnated her leading to two babies with different blood types. This amazing feat had the scientific term superfecundation. It is so rare as to be almost a miracle in itself. But maybe the wild orgies in sleepy, rural villages increase the odds. Leads were followed to find Joanna’s lover and a name written on her mattress led to wild speculation in the media. Until it turned out that it was the name of the owner of the mattress shop. Surprisingly, he was never considered a suspect.

When the case went to court, what was revealed was that Joanna had indeed miscarried and more or less alone, bleeding, in tears had buried her own baby in her backyard as best she could to avoid society’s wrath upon her. She was attacked and harangued on the stand, every minute detail of her relationships, her pain, her ordeal were scrutinised and dismissed, in the court and in public. Her blood flow, her dilation, her everything were all that was on the news, on the radio, on the television every day. Joanna was ill, fainted, needed medical attention regularly and it reduced her to a wreck. On top of the ordeal she had already been though. Finally, the case was thrown out of court an no charges were brought. A further tribunal was set up to investigate police behaviour and so bring some justice for their egregious methods throughout.


Except no, of course not.


The tribunal cleared police of any wrongdoing and the judge presiding went so far as to find that Joanna had strangled her baby to stop it crying, in spite of the pathologist finding no evidence of this at all. Gerry O Carroll maintained his side of the story till the end and took his truth to the grave. In spite of the case being thrown out, Officer O Carroll maintained for decades that the two-father hypothesis was correct and that Joanna was indeed guilty. It wasn’t until many years later that DNA testing allowed the baby from the beach to be exhumed and tested and it was conclusively demonstrated that Joanna Hayes had nothing at all to do with it. Gerry O Carroll was forced to admit he had been wrong. So obviously he apologised for his behaviour.


No, of course not. He never apologised or admitted any wrongdoing of any kind. Which begs the question… how do you get a mother and her entire family to confess to a murder they have nothing to do with? As a final blow, Joanna Hayes wrote a memoir years later in which she claimed that her and her family had been beaten, abused and intimidated until they confessed. Not only did Gerry O Carroll disagree, but the courts backed him, saying it was an absurd allegation. Even more, he was awarded almost 20,000 Irish pounds as compensation for libellous accusations.


Finally, finally, in 2020, the state publicly apologised to Joana Hayes for its treatment of her, and she and her family were awarded 2.5 million euros. No apology was coming from Gerry O Carroll of course.

As far as I know Joana still lives in the same area and I’ve seen her on occasion, when passing through. I guess the money isn’t much consolation for so much of her life ruined but maybe there’s some consolation in knowing that what happened to her was a spark that helped to overturn the old order of the country. People began looking through narrowed eyes at the church, the police, the institutions, even though it would be many years, and many more scandals and abuses of power, before the suspicion bore fruit.


Anyway, I only write this as the news of Gerry O Carroll’s death brought back memories of that time and the feelings of confusion and revulsion that were running through the country. It’s certainly not to mourn his passing.

 

TLDR Ireland was a bit shit in the 80s.

What a good post.

Fantastic post. What a total unmitigated cunt he was.

Mad to hear how backwards Ireland actually was in the 80s - but also quite nice to see how far it's come.

Unless I dreamt it my wife was listening to a podcast about this a few months ago.  I can usually fall asleep to/ignore her morbid stuff (honestly I think the podcast is actually called Morbid), but this one kept me awake.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Unless I dreamt it my wife was listening to a podcast about this a few months ago.  I can usually fall asleep to/ignore her morbid stuff (honestly I think the podcast is actually called Morbid), but this one kept me awake.

Oh my wife listens to Morbid all the time. Shes hooked on podcasts about true crime, serial killers, horrific murders etc.

I'm convinced she's doing research...

Funnily enough a lot of the episodes she listens to involve a husband mysteriously disappearing and the case never being solved.

Ireland (the entire island) is littered with tragedies such as this. Countless babies murdered and buried in ummarked graves and countless mothers mentally devastated because of the social "norms" of centuries.

It is to our eternal shame that everbody fucking knew it was happening and did nothing.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weela_Weela_Walya

It's a playground classic. Every Irish kid has sung it.

David Soul (Hutch), 80.

My treat as a kid was being allowed to stay up late to watch Starsky & Hutch.

Nooooooooooo…