Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

To mark International Women’s Day, this introduction from a new book by  NELL MCCAFFERTY plots how the ‘medieval’ treatment of Joanne Hayes in the Kerry Babies case acted as a catalyst for change

IT WAS MEDIEVAL. A group of men put a young unmarried woman on the stand and questioned her about the exact circumstances of the conception and birth and death of her newborn baby. She came from a tiny village in the west of Ireland. They had come down from the capital, Dublin. The pope had just come and gone from Ireland. The men wondered aloud if the woman had in fact given birth to two newborn babies who had been found dead in Kerry, though blood tests showed that she could only have been mother to one. The men put forward and examined for six months a theory of superfecundation, which postulates that a woman can conceive of twins by two men if she has sexual intercourse with both in the space of 24 hours. “There were times when we all thought she had twins,” said presiding Justice Kevin Lynch.