"Joanne was the anvil on which the new Ireland was hammered out."  So said Nell McCafferty to Alan Torney for a report on the Kerry babies case, on which Nell has written a book, A Woman to Blame.  Alan asked Nell to set the scene in 1984 when Joanne Hayes' life was turned upside down by the Garda investigation and the subsequent tribunal of inquiry into the Kerry Babies case.

"She'd had a daughter by a married man, kept the daughter at home – this is in the days of the Magdalene Laundries – reared the daughter herself and held down a job.  People were stunned by this… and then to be pregnant a second time by the same married man did not help her case or her reputation…  Joanne had her baby and suffered because of that, then at the end of that people swung round to her point of view."

In archive footage from The Late Late Show, Joanne told Gay Byrne,

"I didn't expect a clap on the back but I didn't expect they'd go so hard on me.  After all, the tribunal was set up to look into the behaviour of the Gardaí but it was I who went on trial.  The tribunal itself was a terrible experience…  I think it was very anti-women, not just anti-me but anti-women altogether."

Nell was present at the tribunal and describes aspects of it as "horrendous" on many levels.

"She was so sick on the stand that she had to be sedated… we heard her out in the corridor retching and crying.  She was brought in sedated, so heavily sedated that her head kept bobbing off the microphone.  I blame myself here…  Why didn't I stand up and say, this is illegal.  I didn't.  I was intimidated like everybody else.  And the judge then advised Joanne's friends to bring her home to sleep in their house that night because they thought she was suicidal.  That was the Kerry Babies case."

Nell recalls how the country finally rose up in support of Joanne.  Nell encouraged people to send a yellow flower to Joanne to show their solidarity, which they did in abundance.  When the judge presiding over the case complained at the nation's sympathy extending solely to Joanne and not to the wife of the man she had had an affair with, even she came out to say that Joanne had been treated harshly.

"Joanne inadvertently became a symbol of all that was wrong, all the male chauvinism, all the right-wing Catholicism, the fevered year (before) the result of the 8th amendment and as we watched Joanne being crucified… people swung around and said no…  She's undergoing that crucifixion now again."

Click here to listen to that report in full.