Latest news with #ClodaghHawe
Irish Times
31-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Deadly Silence: The compelling and harrowing story on the killing of Clodagh Hawe and her children
Deadly Silence: A Sister's Battle to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of Clodagh and Her Sons by Alan Hawe Author : Jacqueline Connolly (with Kathryn Rogers) ISBN-13 : 978-1399706650 Publisher : Hachette Books Ireland Guideline Price : €16.99 On the night of August 29th, 2016, one of the most devastating cases of murder-suicide occurred in Ireland. Alan Hawe butchered his wife, Clodagh, and their three young sons, Liam, Niall and Ryan, before taking his own life. The ensuing shock waves reverberated through the Cavan townland of Castlerahan, where Hawe had been vice-principal of the local national school, and echoed throughout the entire country. Jacqueline Connolly reveals the circumstances leading up to that dreadful night when she lost her sister and three nephews, and the family's struggle for answers in its aftermath. She unveils a litany of failures with the initial Garda investigation, arguing that they 'closed ranks around uncomfortable truths' and the battle she and her mother went through to secure a review by the Garda serious crime review team. [ 'Alan Hawe was a wolf in sheep's clothing who fooled us all': Clodagh Hawe's sister on her fight for the truth Opens in new window ] Alan Hawe left behind a five-page 'murder letter', written while the mutilated body of his dead wife lay nearby, alleging via a host of 'pseudo-altruistic' claims that he had spared his family from some great shame; he had been caught 'red-handed' and it was all going to 'blow up'. READ MORE Connolly admits to never taking to pillar-of-the-community Hawe, but believed that he and Clodagh were happy together in their 'all-consuming marriage'. Only after their death did she realise the cracks in that perfect veneer, with the revelation that the 'cold, twisted and manipulative' Hawe exercised coercive control over her sister, that he was seeing a counsellor about a pornography addiction, and that Clodagh was considering leaving him. She confesses to not realising 'the depths of his darkness', which ultimately led to a murder 'as premeditated and cold as a professional assassination'. Connolly uses the book to call for a 'better, kinder' inquest process, one that doesn't result in families receiving difficult information in the full glare of the public eye, while the Garda review included strong recommendations on how future investigations into murder-suicides should be conducted. Connolly's life has been marred by such considerable tragedy – she also lost her brother and husband to suicide – that it seems incredible that she has been able to write this harrowing, heart-rending memoir. That it is so utterly compelling, even as she narrates some deeply distressing events, is a testament to her resilience and grace under the most catastrophic circumstances.
Irish Times
15-05-2025
- Irish Times
Jacqueline Connolly: ‘I didn't know what coercive control was until my family were killed'
In 2016, Clodagh Hawe and her three sons, Liam (13), Niall (11) and Ryan (6) were murdered in their Co Cavan home, by their husband and father Alan Hawe, who later took his own life. It was, and still is, Ireland's largest murder-suicide and the brutal killings sent shockwaves throughout the country. In her book, Deadly Silence , Clodagh's younger sister Jacqueline Connolly, gives her account of the circumstances leading up to the mass murder and how her brother-in-law, Hawe, coercively controlled and manipulated her unsuspecting sister. Looking back now, Connolly says she can see some of the red flags surrounding Hawe, but at the time, she wasn't aware of this form of abuse. READ MORE 'I didn't know what coercive control was until they [my family] were killed,' she tells Róisín Ingle on the latest episode of The Irish Times Women's Podcast. Connolly and her family first spoke publicly about their family tragedy in 2019, after feeling let down by the initial Garda investigation. [ 'Alan Hawe was a wolf in sheep's clothing who fooled us all': Clodagh Hawe's sister on her fight for the truth Opens in new window ] The media attention that followed prompted the gardaí to commission a second investigation by the serious crime review team, the findings of which were disclosed to the family in January 2024. It found the initial inquiry mishandled CCTV evidence and missed digital evidence in the case. The family are now calling for the report to be made public, in order to highlight the behaviours of family annihilators and to prevent further tragedies. Connolly believes this action could save lives. 'Clodagh, Liam, Niall and Ryan might still be here… Look at all the murder suicides that have happened up to now and [they all have] the same coroner's investigation. What have we learned? I'm being vulnerable, I'm being open. Take and learn from it.' [ Kathy Sheridan: Who felt informed enough in those first few days to call Alan Hawe a cold-blooded murderer? Opens in new window ] In writing the book, Connolly also hopes to raise greater awareness about domestic abuse and the warning signs to look out for. 'There are people in the shadows, men in GAA clubs in communities, caring, kind, trusting, but what are they like behind closed doors?' 'When you saw Alan, you saw Clodagh, you saw the three boys, they went everywhere together. They were this family unit. They were in my eyes, the perfect family. There was nothing untoward going on,' she recalls. 'I didn't see anything to challenge. Now we're educated on what coercive control is. We're educated on what family annihilators look like. I might not have liked him, but I trusted him'. [ 'I knew him for 20 years ... I knew him but I didn't know him' Opens in new window ] The book, she says 'is to protect women and children and to safeguard them and to show people it could be anybody standing around you. One in three women are coercively controlled.' You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Irish Times
14-05-2025
- Irish Times
Who felt informed enough in those first few days to call Alan Hawe a cold-blooded murderer?
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself, said playwright Arthur Miller . And in the hours after Alan Hawe brutally murdered his wife Clodagh and three young sons before taking his own life in their Co Cavan home almost 10 years ago, newspaper coverage was probably a fair reflection of a horrified, bewildered national conversation. 'Why did he do it?' How could a well-liked, churchgoing family man, a primary schoolteacher and GAA stalwart commit such a heinous crime? The sheer ordinariness and apparent decency of the perpetrator, and what seemed to be a total absence of warning signs, were an obvious focus for early reporting. Journalists reported the scraps they knew, notably the fulsome tributes to Alan Hawe from neighbours, the priest and community: 'A kind and decent person with an overriding need to look after those around him'; 'the most normal man you could meet'; 'a brilliant dad'. And so, in the absence of any deeper knowledge or insights, it was framed as a 'family tragedy'. A mental health issue. A 'murder-suicide'. He just 'snapped'. Because how else could the righteous family man's heinous final acts be explained? One columnist speculated that he might be the key to 'finally breaking the stigma around mental health', a view that threatened to heroise him as a kind of martyred stoic. Articles carried calls for increased mental health funding. They often carried the Samaritans' helpline number at the end, but not the number for Women's Aid. [ 'Alan Hawe was a wolf in sheep's clothing who fooled us all': Clodagh Hawe's sister on her fight for the truth Opens in new window ] By this narrative, Alan Hawe was simply another tragic victim. His butchered wife and sons were collateral damage. The hashtag Twitter response – #HerNameWasClodagh – tried to rectify the omission. READ MORE Thanks to Clodagh's remarkably brave and dogged sister Jacqueline Connolly and their mother Mary Coll, we know that Alan Hawe had meticulously planned the murders and had exhibited signs of coercive control – now a criminal offence - for many years. No one knew that in the early days. Reporters, as always, relied on leaks from the investigation while others tried to navigate the febrile, delicate bonds of a small community in trauma, grateful to anyone prepared to speak to them, while their editors champed for new angles. But 'it can take up to six days before the full details of a case have been ascertained', says the 2023 Study on Familicide & Domestic and Family Violence Death Reviews. Such early reporting often begins with the construction of a 'crime narrative' but while the Hawe case was framed as a 'family tragedy', the 'masking' effect of any such narratives holds true. Larger societal patterns – such as the average of 1,250 domestic violence incidents every week in 2024 and 41 prosecutions for coercive control in two years – are masked by speculation about motive or the likelihood of mental health issues, and take precedence over an understanding that many domestic homicides are an extreme form of domestic violence. No trained journalist is obtuse enough to deliberately omit a woman victim from their reporting – think of the media frenzy around murdered women such as Rachel O'Reilly or Celine Cawley . But look up the 275 women killed since 1996, named on Women's Aid Femicide Watch; eight out of 10 of those cases have been resolved. Yet it's striking how few of the victims' names are familiar. Of the resolved cases, nearly nine out of 10 of the women were killed by a man known to them. In almost all murder-suicide cases (23 out of 24) the killer was the woman's current or former intimate partner. [ Stolen Lives: 239 violent deaths of women in Ireland from 1996 to today (2022) Opens in new window ] Maybe the question is not why a woman's identity can be omitted from reporting of her own murder but why only a certain type of victim – or killer – gets the coverage. Another might be why Helen McEntee 's dogged focus on domestic violence as minister for justice was regularly characterised as a preoccupation with 'woke' by some political colleagues. What was that meant to convey? The study's authors asked bereaved family members what they want from reporters. They want them 'to stand back and impartially identify different categories of death by describing the fact that the perpetrator murdered a partner or murdered children prior to dying by suicide'. In murder-suicides there are no legal issues; the perpetrator is dead, no criminal prosecution will occur. But in those first days, decent media professionals are constantly balancing principles of privacy against the public's right to know and the freedom of the press. Strangers with microphones are accosting local people – 'Did you know them?' 'What was HE like?'. No, he was a lovely man, of course we never saw it coming. What else are people to say when the bodies are not yet buried, they don't know the facts and they must face those broken relatives for the rest of their lives? Who felt informed enough to stand up in those first few days and call Alan Hawe a cold-blooded murderer? Jacqueline has said it was only the day after the funeral, when they had accompanied Alan Hawe and his murdered family to be buried together, that she and her mother wondered what they had been thinking. Were outsiders entitled to know that at the time? Many questions are examined by the study, which is well worth a read. But perhaps society should start asking itself a larger question: why, even in such extraordinarily sensitive cases as multiple deaths, do we feel we deserve all the answers, instantly? And what does 'do your job' mean when bellowed at journalists in a catastrophe? Women's Aid support services are listed at
Times
13-05-2025
- Times
Clodagh Hawe ‘did not know extent of killer husband's porn addiction'
Clodagh Hawe did not know the extent of her husband's pornography addiction before he murdered her and their three sons, her sister has revealed. On the evening of August 28, 2016, the rural town of Ballyjamesduff in Co Cavan changed for ever. After months of meticulous planning, Alan Hawe, 40, killed his wife Clodagh, 39, with a hatchet and knife in their sitting room before walking upstairs to murder his sons Liam, 13, Niall, 11, and Ryan, 6, in their bedrooms. A state pathologist suggested the children had been stabbed in their Adam's apples to prevent them from screaming. Their father, a deputy school principal, then hanged himself once he was satisfied his affairs were in order. Although known to be a controlling husband, Hawe,
Irish Times
12-05-2025
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on the Clodagh Hawe case: real questions for State and society
Many readers will have been moved by the testimony of Jacqueline Connolly, whose memoir, Deadly Silence, has been published this week. The book details the experience of losing her brother and husband to suicide, experiences that most people would find difficult to imagine bearing. It is also a clear-eyed account of the circumstances and aftermath of the murder of her sister Clodagh and three nephews, Liam, Niall and Ryan Clodagh Hawe and her three sons were murdered in 2016 in Castlerahan, Co Cavan by Alan Hawe, Clodagh's husband and the boys' father, who subsequently took his own life. The story as recounted in the book raises troubling questions about coercive control, victims' rights and social attitudes to familial murder-suicide. A Serious Crime Review report into the initial investigation into the murder was finally completed by the Garda in 2023. The 800-page document has not been published but its findings and recommendations are 'incorporated into senior investigative training'. This seems inadequate. In Garda briefings on the report to Clodagh Hawe's family, as described in Deadly Silence, they acknowledge flaws in the investigation's handling of CCTV evidence and the manner in which key witness testimonies were collected. Digital evidence was also missed. READ MORE Just as unsatisfactory is the State's failure to address the long-standing legal loophole surrounding inheritance rights in cases of familial killings. That became a matter of public debate following the killing of Celine Cawley by her husband Eamonn Lillis in Dublin 2008. Legislation proposing changes to the law was published in 2017, but was never progressed. Irish society has also been slow to recognise the ways in which coercive control can be exercised, sometimes invisibly, in a family or relationship. The welcome introduction of legislation in 2019 criminalising such behaviour has hopefully raised awareness. Murder-suicides, with all their attendant trauma, pose a particular challenge for the communities in which they occur as well as for law enforcement. Public reaction may seek to frame the crime in a way that diminishes the responsibility of the perpetrator. That was the experience of Jacqueline Connolly and her mother as they struggled to understand what had really happened to Clodagh and her sons. In their account, there is a lacuna in how the State deals with cases of this sort when there is no living person to prosecute for a crime. None of the questions raised by this appalling tragedy would have come to light had it not been for the perseverance of Jacqueline Connolly. While her commitment and determination are to be admired, her search for the truth should never have been made so difficult.
