The Kerry Babies Case

Not made by Channel 4 but by Peninsula TV - a "content production company based in Dublin and New York". 

They produced the Heiress and the Heist, a 3 parter about Rose Dugdale which is on Prime. An amazing story but produced for a foreign audience and without Rose Dugdale's involvement, as far as I can tell. Do Irish people need talking heads repeatedly telling us "her upper-class British accent would not have endeared her to most IRA members"? Far more relevant would be what the Provos made of her Marxist views and revolutionary aims. The Provos had just split from the Officials over that issue.

Here's a simple rule to judge any documentary - do we hear all the main protagonists directly or do we get one side of the story or, worst of all, do we get a lot of voice-overs and opinionated journalists in carefully lit settings telling us what to think.

Correction - it seems we’re still at the “a file is being prepared for the DPP” stage.

That doesn’t mean the DPP has no file on the case, just that the Gardai have not yet completed their file to the point where they will submit it to the DPP.

My point remains- this documentary is dealing with an open investigation and would need to tread very carefully to avoid contaminating the process and the potential jury pool. It seems very odd to release a documentary just when we might get to discover the truth about the appalling murder.

https://www.radiokerry.ie/news/gardai-say-baby-john-investigation-will-result-in-file-being-prepared-for-dpp-351982

Gerry O'Connell (was it?) must be one of the most tone-deaf individuals I've come across - he just didn't seem to understand the consequences of his actions. Actually I'm not sure what his actions or position were: at one point he claimed to have acted "like a father" to Joanne; at another he claimed to have found it necessary to force a confession out of Joanne Hayes because he had psychological knowledge that allowed him to be able to look into peoples mind's and see them for what they were (err . . .didn't do such a good job on this case then!); towards the end of the programmes he was pictured in archive film ranting at an AGSI meeting about how the "Murder Squad" had been thrown under the bus; and then he claimed he'd known Joanne was innocent all along but was prevented from following that line because of Supt Courtney.

I watched the UK transmission on Channel 4: when they Hayes family were speaking - which although accented was perfectly intelligible - they were subtitled! is that what we've come to? Was that the case on the Virgin transmission??