A Woman to Blame by Nell McCafferty

Author:Nell McCafferty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cork University Press

11. Tom Flynn

The judge sat up on his dais, the legal men ranged themselves below him, and the women friends of Joanne Hayes were brought forward one by one to the anvil of the witness box and forced under oath to deny her. It was quite simply done. Had they known, the question was put to Martina Rohan, Aileen Enright, Mary O’Riordan, Peggy Houlihan and Mary Shanahan, that she was pregnant?

They had.

Had she lied to them upon her release from hospital, claiming she had had a miscarriage?

She had.

Mary O’Riordan tried to soften the blow. Asked by Mr Anthony Kennedy, counsel for the guards, if she was disappointed that Joanne had misled her, she replied ‘No, she went through very hard times.’

Dermot McCarthy, senior counsel for the Hayeses, had Mary O’Riordan recalled later because, he said, information which had just come to him indicated that a wrong impression had been given that Joanne had lied to Mary O’Riordan.

Mr McCarthy then asked his witness: ‘Did she explicitly tell you that she had lost the baby in hospital?’

Ms O’Riordan had to say ‘Yes.’

It was not Mr McCarthy’s finest hour, though subsequent events were to show that it was not his worst.

Peggy Houlihan was asked by Martin Kennedy to account for her temerity in having a drink after work with Jeremiah Locke. He observed that she, a married woman, was ‘out drinking with a married man. I see.’ Moreover, he declaimed, this married man was known to indulge in affairs. Mr Kennedy’s indignation mounted as he pursued the implications of this. ‘Is your husband alive? What did your husband think about that?’ He asked her how her husband was supposed to fetch his own tea, while she was in the pub.

All the women were asked if they knew a certain Tom Flynn. They didn’t. His name had been found, written in biro, on the mattress on which Joanne Hayes slept. He was, insisted Martin Kennedy, Joanne’s lover before she met Jeremiah Locke. As his name rang and recurred through the proceedings, Tom Flynn acquired the notoreity of the wild colonial boy, Jack Dougan from nearby Castlemaine, who had emigrated to Australia in the previous century, where he robbed the rich to help the poor, according to the ballad. Where, however, was Tom Flynn? Mr Kennedy, acting under instructions from Superintendent John Courtney, and in hot pursuit of the theory of superfecundation, wanted to know.

The people of Tralee knew, but they didn’t enlighten him. They chose instead to ridicule a tribunal that appeared to them to be increasingly ridiculous, by sporting T-shirts that had been hurriedly printed by a local entrepreneur. ‘I’m Tom Flynn’ the T-shirts proclaimed.

Weeks were to pass before the tribunal established that Tom Flynn used to work in a shop selling mattresses, that he had emigrated to America in 1969 when Joanne Hayes was a ten-year-old, and that he had never returned home.

Ridicule changed to shock when the men who did know Joanne Hayes came forward to testify.

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