Truth, Power and Lies: Irish Society and the Case of the Kerry Babies (review)

Applying sociological theory and "thick description," Tom Inglis investigates the April, 1984, scandal of the Kerry babies, when two dead newborns were found—one near Cahirciveen and the other across the bay, near Slea Head—on the Dingle peninsula. Gardaí blamed unmarried Joanne Hayes, who had just given birth; she and her family became targets of media attention, legal and medical debate, and moral censure. Inglis demonstrates that Hayes represented a modern woman challenging traditional Catholic mores of the "long nineteenth century." One of the babies found near the bay was the second child she had borne to a local married man.

Inglis reviews the testimony of witnesses, forensic evidence, and testimony from the Hayes family and their neighbors. Eventually, oceanographers, psychologists, pathologists, and the Murder Squad also entered their opinions. What had at first seemed an easily solved murder unraveled when claims of superfecundation were charged—that Hayes bore twins by different fathers, as the two babies found bore different blood types. According to prosecutors, this extremely rare occurrences, trengthened the case for Hayes's sexual degeneracy. Inglis displays how the tribunal report may be read as "an innovative piece of ethnographic research" into the conflicts between the state and the family, rural and urban Ireland, and Catholic and secular morality in the 1980s.

Inglis never resolves who was responsible for the deaths of the Kerry babies. Rather, he takes the incident to be an example of a witch-hunt, one in which powerful forces manipulated this still mysterious incident into a symbol of the collapse of church control over Irish women. The concept of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus—"the automatic predisposed way," in which everyday events are interpreted as right or wrong—informs Inglis's appraisal of how customary mores of sexuality, farming, Catholicism, and the repression of individual choice eroded within the Hayes family. For Joanne Hayes in 1984, the secularization of Irish society had not yet arrived. Inglis reads the unmarried woman's decision to raise a daughter fathered by a married man, and her predicament after again becoming pregnant by him, as a microcosmic articulation of the forces then beginning to undermine Catholic morality.

Inglis pays particular attention to the role of the body in his interpretation of Joanne Hayes's position. He proposes that within this then-twenty-seven-year-old woman's body, a clash of two ideologies occurs: fitness versus fasting, self-indulgence versus self-denial (Hayes worked at a gymnasium in Tralee). His exploration of her embodied cultural tension provides an innovative thesis:

She began to express herself in an urban society in which she was not so well known. At night she went home to a family and a traditional way of life in which notions of self, desire and pleasure had a long history of denial and repression.

Inglis succeeds in presenting Hayes not only as a pawn played by legislative and coercive entities, but also—albeit to a limited extent—as a young woman increasingly convinced that rewards invited by her own actions and promised by a Westernizing hedonism could sustain her in a chosen, single motherhood.

Inglis adapts Bourdieu's competing notions of public and private honor, symbolic and cultural capital to the struggle between traditional and modern Ireland, as he examines the impact endured by the local gardaí when pitted against the determined anti-subversive agencies developed by the Dublin government in the 1970s and 1980s against terrorism. The infamous "heavy gang" within the detective force could build a confession in a manner analogous to the producer or editor of a documentary film. As the Hayes family discovered after their own confessions were, in Inglis's view, manufactured, reality could be whatever the stronger and louder culture desired it to be. For Joanne Hayes and her family, the results of resisting this pressure proved disastrous.

In closing, Inglis...