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.
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.
Who felt informed enough in those first few days to call Alan Hawe a cold-blooded murderer?
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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 womensaid.ie/get-help/support-services
