Kerry babies: Assault claims dismissed as ‘products of fertile imagination'

The Kerry Babies Tribunal opened in Tralee on January 7, 1985, and ran for 82 days. During the course of the tribunal, a number of claims by the Hayes’ family that they had been assaulted by gardaí investigating the case were examined. All were rejected as untrue.

Head of the tribunal Justice Kevin Lynch devoted a number of chapters to the allegations of assault and included two further chapters assessing the “creditworthiness” of the Hayes family and the Garda examining the case.

Before assessing the claims of assault, Justice Lynch noted: “The tribunal is satisfied that if the gardaí were prosecuted before a jury for the matters alleged against them by the Hayes family, the jury would have no hesitation in rejecting all such charges because of the broad unreliability so far as truthfulness is concerned, of the Hayes family.”