From top: Clodagh Hawe; From left: Jacqueline Connolly and Mary Coll on Claire Byrne Live last night
Last night.
Claire Byrne Live on RTÉ One.
Clodagh Hawe’s mother Mary Coll and sister Jacqueline Connolly last night called for a new and full inquiry into the 2016 murders in County Cavan of Clodagh, Liam, Niall and Ryan Hawe, to find out why Alan Hawe did what he did.
Four weeks ago, Mary and Jacqueline were officially refused their legal request for copies of the garda files from the investigation.
Jacqueline said:
“There was no initial support, I remember the Monday, myself and Mam trying to contact people and there was nobody there. There was no initial person with us on the day to say, you know, ‘this has happened’ and to take time, or anything like that.
“We were seeing things online, we were ringing our family liaison officer at one point to say ‘please tell me he didn’t kill her with an axe’. So it was the media that was informing us more so than anybody else initially.”
Two weeks before the inquest we got a copy of his letter, which was 16 months after it happened. Having to wait over a year, as we did, to have sight of the complete murder/suicide letter is wrong on so many levels.”
Jacqueline added:
There were bits and pieces of information and as you know we went through and inquest and the law for the inquest is very limited so we only find out where, when, how it happened and who it happened to but we never found out the why and we were advised that that probably would never happen at the inquest.
But he has said in his own words that 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. We don’t know why he was ringing the INTO, whether it was for advice for a grievance. We don’t know where it happened, when it happened.
We do know, in the June, he cancelled all his counselling sessions and this all happened the day before he was to return to school so it was avoidance of the consequences he was about to face.”
Believing the murders were meticulously planned and not caused by depression, Mary said:
“I wanted to shout from the rooftops, that’s not the truth, that’s not what happened. We’ve been controlled since this happened by our decency, our sense of decency but it’s not easy to sit and talk about this but we just feel that people need to be aware of the truth and that is the truth.
We just need answers to the questions. You know, he was caught, who caught him, what was he doing, where was he doing it, why did he feel the need that he had to wipe out his whole family, what was so bad that he was doing.“
Jacqueline said:
“Reading the letter it would seem that he killed Clodagh first and he sat and he wrote five pages about how he felt, and how the truth was going to come out eventually and he reassured us that if it was any consolation that they were happy.
And he then killed the boys and he came downstairs then and he wrote some more. And then he transferred money, and he went about his business while his family were dead around him, and he set out folders and wrote notes.
At about 2.30am that morning, he transferred about €2,500 from the joint account to his own account, so at that point he was a criminal and then he was fraudulently transferring money.
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.
We were initially told it would be no problem to have him moved but then we realised that the exhumation could not happen unless Alan Hawe’s next of kin applied for him to be moved. So we asked the Hawe family to move him. Eventually, they allowed it to happen.”
Watch back here.
‘Evil, brutality and control’: Clodagh Hawe’s family seeks answers over murders (RTÉ)
Previously: Her Name Was Clodagh