‘It’s up to us to make sure this doesn’t happen again’

The family of the late Clodagh Hawe and her sons, who were murdered by husband and father Alan Hawe, have called for a full inquiry into the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Representatives of the family are set to meet with the Minister for Justice later this week. 

Clodagh’s mother Mary Coll and her sister Jacqueline Connolly appeared in an interview special on the Claire Byrne Live show on RTÉ last Monday night.

Ms Coll said her daughter had confided to her that Mr Hawe had been caught watching pornography and he went for counselling.

Ms Connolly said: “He was caught red-handed and we do know that he was looking at pornography on the school laptop and he never brought the school laptop home.
“We’ve had sight of the counselling notes and he had said he was masturbating somewhere that he shouldn’t have been, possibly at the school. So we have pieces of information but we don’t know who caught him.”
Ms Coll and Ms Connolly said, prior to killing his family and himself, Mr Hawe had conflict with a work colleague, had contacted teachers’ union the INTO, and in his suicide letter was concerned that “the truth was going to come out”.
Mr Hawe killed his wife Clodagh (39) and their sons Liam (13), Niall (11) and Ryan (6) at the Ballyjamesduff home they shared in August 2016.

An inquest the following year concluded that Clodagh and her three sons were unlawfully killed by Mr Hawe, who then took his own life.
“She couldn’t save herself, she couldn’t save her three children, so it’s up to us to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” said Ms Coll.
Ms Coll and Ms Connolly hope Garda Commissioner Drew Harris will, as a result of the tragedy, now set up a special investigation unit for familicide, and for Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan to amend the Succession Act that makes the perpetrator, or if deceased their family, a beneficiary of the estate, rather than the victim’s family.
They propose too that, immediately after the conclusion of an inquest in the case of familicide, a book of evidence is published and Tusla, the Child and Family Protection Agency, is responsible for independently monitoring all such cases and maintaining research on perpetrators.

Review

The family has also called for a review of the Coroner’s Act and laws surrounding exhumations. In the immediate aftermath of the family’s deaths, Mr Hawe was buried alongside Clodagh and their sons in Castlerahan, but later exhumed and only after his next of kin agreed.
“The next day after the funeral, we went to the graves and the horror of what we’d done, the stupor in our trauma, we had buried him with them,” said Ms Connolly.
Ms Connolly said reading by his suicide letter “it would seem that he killed Clodagh first and he sat and he wrote five pages about how he felt” before then killing the boys. “At about half two that morning, he transferred about two and half thousand euro from the joint account to his own account.”
Ms Coll said he wrote in the letter “it was easier for them to die than to have to live with the truth of what he was doing”.
 

Helpline

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article please contact: Samaritans on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.ie