Cavan family annihilation by a "brilliant Dad"

[DoinItFine]

Is anyone else reading all about what an amazing guy Alan Hawe was with mounting disbelief and fury?

He stabbed his wife and three sons to death in a frenzied attack and then hung himself.

But poor him, he must have bern awful tortured. And he went to mass all the time.

Great Dad

You know when you read awful threads about abuse on MN and then out it comes "he's a great Dad", and you think "what does a man have to do to losr that label?"

Well apparently you can murder your 3 kids and still keep the Great Dad title.

There IS a middle way between blasting Alan from the pulpit and saying what a family man he was or that no questions should be asked.

A good priest would have been able to find that way.

I just wish the press would get their act together - sub editors write the headlines (not the actual individual journos) and they do so according to rules set out by the editorial policy of their paper. If I was a newspaper editor, the word "murder" would have to be used somewhere in the headline: "Family murdered by father", "Woman murdered in so-called 'honour killing'", "Woman and her daughter murdered by estranged partner"... Why can't society at large call this what it actually is?

Alan did commit suicide

Yes.

And really it was his funeral.

The others were just there for decoration. In death as in life.

Imagine having a funeral for 4 murdered people and having a collection at the end for suicide because their murderer killed himself.

Awful.

Priests are no longer allowed to take positions of judgement, not even of mass murderers.

So mass murder is no longer a sin?

Just like suicide, I guess.

A bit of googling shows that the most common month for family annihilation is August, as in this case (20% of cases as opposed to just over 8% if there was even dostribution). I suppose because the children are at home most of the time and therefore available to be killed at a time of the murderer's choosing, and before he has to relinquish some control over them when they go back to school.

He murdered them after a family day out, which is another pattern.

I think the Irish/ church community as a whole should take a long hard look at themselves. This is like a throw back our darkest periods.

The way we are encouraged forgive the most evil acts like it is for our own sake. Don't acknowledge your feelings ,just skip straight to the ' set piece' lines, I forgive !!!
I see & hear it time & time again.
Perpetrators crimes are listed after their ' good deeds'.

Things we accept & forgive our pillars of society for include paedophia & murder.
Things we don't accept are making a scene, speaking ill of the dead, not accepting your 'burdens' with good grace.
Is our society still so worried about will the priest/people think. Doing things the 'right' way. Keeping dignified?

This bullshit needs to stop.
Alan probably felt empowered by that mentality.
Clodagh was trapped by it.

Prople need to wake up &
Take their voices back .

Things we don't accept are making a scene, speaking ill of the dead, not accepting your 'burdens' with good grace
Spot on. If there is somebody in the community or family who had their doubts about the killer in the past or even proof that the he wasn't previously a 100% lovely man, do you think they will break ranks and say so? Or will they toe the party line of "yes so sad he just inexplicably went crazy one day".

The mentality of expecting people to "not to make a scene" is how a lot of oppression happens- from the trivial to the tragic, a contributor to a lot of sexual assault and probably a factor in why a lot of women stay with abusive men. It needs busted.

So it's the "media"'s fault that everyone was falling over themselves to sing Alan Hawe's praises?

Nothing at all to do with a culture that accepts male violence against women as inevitable and understandable.

No, the media forced all those people to say all those things.

There are no people in Ballyjamesduff with any power.

Only the media has power.

They should not report accurately the views they hear

Presumably you invented all these strawmen to savage because your argument's crap OP. But just in case, let's break it down again:

• An analysis that doesn't acknowledge that the media has power and the bereaved family don't is woefully inadequate. If you think the family has power, tell us why, and if you don't, tell us why you felt the need to respond with 'there are no people in Ballyjamesduff with any power'.

• The media were not obliged to provide quotes without analysis of the wider phenomena of family annihilation, nor without asking why people feel the need to say things like this after such a massacre. The fact that many media organs did is nobody's fault but those who decide what is printed. You state, and I imagine we all agree, that this has a great deal to do with a culture that normalises violence against women. The media did not report on that, and they should have done. Put bluntly, reporting accurately on what happened needed to include that, and it mostly hasn't.

• There is a distinction between people who have just had half their family wiped out and people who haven't, so you need to stop attempting to blur the two. Nobody who has told you that your criticism of the bereaved mother is inappropriate has also said the same about other people in the village.

What on earth makes you imagine there wasn't a post mortem done on all of them?

Of course there was. It was in the news. It's just done within 24 hrs of death.

There were post-mortems of all the dead in the Cavan case.

Very sorry about what happened to you and your family Elendon.

On another MN thread on the murders are quotes from one Irish newspaper that has interviewed a domestic violence/family murderer expert, who talks about the case, and the importance of focusing on the real victims.

Sorry for the crap you and your family went through Elendon.

Still done hastily, to circumvent the traditional Irish burial.

Not really.

When someone dies of natural causes in Ireland and there are no delays, you would expect the removal to be the day after they died and the funeral the following day.

If you are used to how things are done in England, a Saturday funeral might seem quick after the bodies were discovered on a Monday, but that is quite a long time after the deaths in an Irish context.

Things move very quickly here after someone has died - funeral homes, churches, graveyards etc are all very used to working on about 24-48 hours notice.

I find it bizarre how long it takes to organise a funeral in England.

It's just a different way of dealing with death.

There's no reason to think the post mortems were rushed or not carried out properly.

What did the priest say about Clodagh in particular? We all know about Alan's achievements and he had a GAA jersey on his coffin. The children were budding engineers, budding leaders, team players etc and had toys and sports gear on their coffins.
Clodagh had a family picture on her coffin.
The priest remembers coffee and red jam (strawberry or raspberry? Who cares).
They were great teachers.
Alan and Clodagh sat in Mass.
Alan and Clodagh read the Bible in Mass.
What did Clodagh do that was her "thing" or did she exist only in relation to her husband and children?
Since Alan was such a Superdad, he must have spent a considerable amount of time looking after his sons while encouraging Clodagh to pursue her own interests and maintain her own friendships, didn't he?
So why is "coffee and red jam" the best the priest could come up with?"

Has strangulation been confirmed? Who was strangled?
Was an axe used on someone?

Now, I can see someone getting enraged and grabbing a knife in the kitchen but an axe! That's somehow, though it's horrific enough as it is, even more savage.
My thoughts will be with Clodagh and her children tonight.