The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

It seems completely insane that such matters – allowing a girl barely into puberty not to have her rapist’s baby – were being debated at the highest level of government, and that in the Child X case, the state felt it could put someone under virtual house arrest to stop them leaving the country, but that was Ireland in the nineties.

though we’re not as bad as America,

No you are MUCH worse

Fay says lessons also need to be learned about offender management, to stop letting these men disappear and start a new life, or have their records expunged as if nothing ever happened.

In cases like Robert Howard’s, he was only a child himself when he committed his first crime, and twenty when he first assaulted someone, the start of a pattern of rape and eventually murder that went on for over forty years.

It’s also true that Ireland doesn’t have the best record when it comes to rape conviction rates. Of all the rape cases tried in the country leading up to 1993, only three had ever resulted in sentences of more than seven years, and many were suspended, so the rapists served no time at all. Between 1998 and 2001, the rape conviction rate in the country was just 1 per cent, the lowest in Europe,

Good fucking Lord

Repeatedly, the suspects and murderers in these cases were found to have committed previous crimes. They didn’t commit murder out of the blue. There was almost always a trail of rapes, of assaults, even of attempted murders behind them, and yet they were still free to repeat their crimes.

There was no rehabilitation, she said. Officers were always just waiting for it to happen again, and hoping they could catch the men in time. So perhaps part of the reason so many women went missing in the nineties is that violent men are sheltered, treated with leniency, or their cases bungled so they weren’t convicted despite obvious guilt.

Annie McCarrick’s 1993 case – a beautiful young American girl in love with Ireland – at least got attention. There was a full-scale hunt for her, with FBI agents even visiting from America. But later that same year, in July, another woman would go missing and barely receive a second thought.

It doesn’t happen here, the police said – as if they could not contemplate that sort of murder, a woman taken from her home or the side of a road by some brutal stranger. This was Ireland, not America.

The individual cases obscure and mask the real statistics, the fact that maybe people come to harm more often than we think. If I were her family, I would have been hurt and angry that Eva wasn’t included in the cold-case review, that she was simply forgotten about because of her mental health history, and her age.

Even after researching these cases for years, I kept finding new names, women dead or missing in the triangle who I’d never heard of before, who hadn’t been linked to the other cases. Maybe because certain assumptions were made, such as suicide, as in Eva Brennan’s case. Or because there was an obvious suspect.

She’d also had a child despite not being married, who had been adopted within the extended family. In what seems to me an unbearably sad twist, the girl – now grown up – attended Marie’s funeral without being told that this was her mother.

Christ!

To me, these two cases, Eva’s disappearance and Marie’s murder, say a lot about how we deal with mental illness in Ireland. That we can’t see there’s a big leap between suffering from occasional depression and killing yourself over a small family row.

Ireland has the fourth-highest rate of suicide in Europe among young people, and at least one person kills themselves every day. Northern Ireland currently has the highest suicide rate in the UK.

Suicide rates rose sharply in Ireland from the seventies, peaking in 1998, although it’s much more common among men than women. It’s also estimated that suicide was under-reported by as much as 40 per cent in the past, because of the stigma – it remained a criminal offence in Ireland until 1993 (as opposed to 1961 in England).

As in so many of these triangle cases, a suffocating silence has covered her disappearance. Someone must know how a young woman could vanish off the streets of a city in the middle of the day. But no one is talking.

In Imelda’s case, all she did was walk through a busy city, in the middle of the day. Yet still she was gone. That’s all I can say about this disappearance, which seems to have slipped from people’s memories even more thoroughly than those of the other women.

Certainly the police were aware of her disappearance, coming just a few days into January, after a year in which two women were already missing and a third murdered, all within an hour’s distance of each other.

Until we treat every case, every unsolved murder and every suspicious disappearance as equally important, we can’t hope to build up a true picture of what killers are doing.

As I dug deeper into the social history of this time, the mid-nineties, it struck me just how much change took place in this five- or six-year period. Contraception legalised, divorce permitted, state-shaking debates over abortion. Paedophile priests arrested, homosexuality and suicide decriminalised, marital rape criminalised.

There were 155 women found buried there, but only death certificates for half of them, and many could not be named or traced. The Gardaí thought some of the women had died as recently as the late eighties.

What’s less well known is that these establishments didn’t close down until quite recently – several were still open during the nineties, and the last one in Ireland shut in 1996. I think this says something about attitudes to unmarried mothers in Ireland at the time of these disappearances.

Also during this time, in 1996, it emerged that more than 2,000 Irish babies had been forcibly adopted over the years and given to American couples, often those barred from adopting in their own country, and often for sizeable donations to the Church (the same happened in other Catholic countries, such as Spain).

The 2017 discovery of children’s bodies at one mother and baby home in Tuam shows that the nuns were not above failing to register births at all, and that standards of care were often shocking.

The children torn from their mothers were the lucky ones – in some homes, the mortality rate was as high as 60 per cent. Hundreds of babies died, most without official records. Legal cases are currently making their way through the system to try to address this gross injustice, and in 2019 a UN special rapporteur commented that a full investigation was needed.

As we’ve seen, the Child X case reminded us that the government felt it owned women’s bodies, even those of children who had been raped.

At the same time, the hypocrisy was stunning. The Bishop of Galway was exposed in 1992 as having a secret son – this scandal added yet more cracks to the image of the Church in Ireland, already damaged by the child abuse revelations. I remember being sent out of the room yet again when it was discussed, seeing the book about the affair, written by the child’s mother, on sale in Eason’s in Newry and sneaking a peek inside.

Just months before, this same bishop, Eamonn Casey, had publicly condemned the loosening of sexual morality in Ireland.

Well I guess he was speaking from experience.

I learned that Eamonn Casey was also accused of abusing several young girls over several decades from the seventies, including his niece, who was five at the time. He admitted abusing one of them, and two women were paid compensation by the Church. I think the fact I didn’t even know this shows how entirely widespread the culture of abuse, and silence about abuse, was at the time.

Also in the nineties, another well-known priest, who’d also spoken out in the media about sexual morality, was found to have had two children with his housekeeper, one of whom had been put up for adoption. The other one was openly living with them. It says so much about how these men denounce others, while hiding away their own lovers and children, disposing of them like embarrassing secrets, and people did not take kindly to the revelations.

a 2007 survey found that Ireland was the third most homophobic country in the western world. Northern Ireland was the second.

Non-Irish people never believe me when I say this, but it’s true: you couldn’t get divorced in Ireland until 1997. Ireland also had a female President, Mary Robinson, as of 1990. A human rights lawyer, she had fought for women’s rights, for example legalising contraception in the Republic, which only became fully available in 1992. The role of President is largely ceremonial in Ireland, but there was no denying that this was progress, and I remember how inspiring it felt as a young girl to see a woman at the helm.

The country began to feel like a semi-failed state, the image of a warm, welcoming, wholesome place gone for ever, in its place a land ruled by corruption, cruelty and deep hypocrisy. Even though I vaguely remember a lot of this happening at the time – being sent out of the room notwithstanding – it was still surprising to group it together and realise how turbulent these years must have been, centuries of religious dogma swept away in less than a decade.

and this only got worse when someone from the local Gardaí leaked the fact that Jo Jo had a few weeks before travelled to England to have an abortion. They took it on themselves to speculate that she might have been suicidal as a result, although nothing in her behaviour suggested that was the case.

I think it’s worth pointing out that the ‘eighth’ – the amendment to the constitution that banned abortion in all cases, and which the repeal campaign successfully fought to overturn – was only introduced in 1983. This led to the country having some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world; even though there was some leeway for doctors to perform one if a woman’s life was in danger, they often would not do so, afraid of prosecution.

I remember our religion teacher – because yes, we learned about sex in religion class – saying that the rhythm method was a very effective choice if you had to do something about ‘all that’. This kind of wilful blindness had terrible consequences. In the late seventies, almost two-thirds of the population of Ireland were against the sale of contraceptives, and we had the highest birth rate in Europe.

This situation dragged on for some three years until a new government was formed in January 2020. Since March 2020 abortion is now officially legal in the North, although a woman went on trial as recently as July 2019 for buying pills online for her fifteen-year-old daughter. This is the context in which these disappearances and murders took place – a country where shame lingers even more than twenty years later, where women still do not have equal rights, where homophobia and intolerance remain rife.