Twenty-two years later, the bizarre events in the village of Abbeydorney, six miles north of Tralee, have not been wiped from the national consciousness.

Joanne Hayes was 19 years old when she got a job in the Sports Centre in Tralee in 1978. She lived at home with her widowed mother Mary, two bachelor brothers Michael and Ned, her sister Kathleen and her spinster aunt Bridie Fuller.

Three years after starting work as a receptionist in the sports centre, Joanne started a relationship with Jeremiah Locke, a married man who was the groundsman at the centre.

Joanne became pregnant by Locke but this ended in a silent, lonely miscarriage at work in June 1982. She was in love with Locke even though he stayed with his wife, who had their first child the same year. Details of the affair were well-known in the area and despite attempts by her family to bring it to an end, Joanne maintained her relationship with Locke. She then became pregnant by him for a second time.

In May 1983 she gave birth to her baby daughter, Yvonne. Despite Locke's lack of interest in the child, the affair continued. Despite living in rural Ireland where sex outside marriage and extramarital affairs were scorned, Joanne was proud of her daughter. Her sister looked after the new baby while she continued to work at the sports centre.

The unravelling of the affair By the end of 1983, Joanne was again pregnant.

After discovering that Locke's wife was also pregnant again, Joanne and Locke had a falling out that was the beginning of the end of their affair.

By March 1984, Joanne's workmates became concerned that she was obviously heavily pregnant.

She tried to conceal the pregnancy by wearing bulky clothes and had not booked her 13 weeks maternity leave. Joanne appeared to be living a lie that she was not pregnant at all. She went into labour at the family home near Abbeydorney on 12 April 1984. To this day it is unclear what happened afterwards . . . there are conflicting accounts from different members of the Hayes family.

According to Joanne, she left the house, hot and flushed, at around midnight and gave birth to a baby boy alone outside. The baby cried, so she put her hand on the baby's mouth to stop it crying and it subsequently died. She tore the umbilical cord with her hands, left the baby on some hay and went back to her bedroom in the house. The next morning she placed the body of the dead baby into some plastic bags and walked across two fields where she put the body in a water filled hole.

At 8.30pm the following day, Jack Griffin, a farmer from Caherciveen, about 50 miles from the Hayes farm in Abbeydorney, was jogging on a beach near his home when he made the gruesome discovery of a dead newborn baby wedged between rocks on the beach. A plastic fertiliser bag containing two other plastic bags was found near the baby's body. This dead infant became know as 'the Caherciveen Baby'.

When the gardai arrived and examined the body, it became apparent that the baby had been stabbed to death . . . so much so that most of its blood had run away. The discovery of the Caherciveen Baby immediately grabbed national attention.

Gardai from the four Garda districts in the Kerry division . . . Tralee, Caherciveen, Listowel and Killarney . . . were all drafted in to investigate the mysterious discovery.

Members of the investigation section or murder squad of the gardai, based at Garda headquarters in the Phoenix Park, were also requested to come to Kerry to assist the investigation. Detective Superintendent John Courtney, Detective Garda Joe Shelly, Detective Sergeant Gerry O'Carroll, Detective Sergeant Kevin Dillon, and Detective Garda PJ Browne, were among the men to arrive in Kerry to get to the bottom of the case.

A family confession Detective Sergeant Kevin Dillon called St Catherine's Hospital in Tralee to find out that Joanne Hayes had gone to the hospital allegedly miscarrying and a scan had been done which showed no baby. A gynaecologist at the hospital had noticed that there were strong indications that she had delivered a baby although Joanne denied this and claimed she had a miscarriage.

Joanne immediately became the primary suspect in the investigation into the death of the Caherciveen baby.

On 1 May 1984, two weeks after the discovery of the baby on the beach near Caherciveen, Joanne and the rest of the Hayes family were brought in for questioning by the gardai's elite murder squad.

Within hours of being brought into custody, Joanne Hayes and other members of her family had given the gardai signed statements confessing to the murder of the Caherciveen baby. Joanne was charged with the murder of her newborn baby at a special court sitting. Her aunt, brother and sister were charged with the concealment of the birth of the baby and of helping to dispose its body. But then the story took another twist.

During the course of interrogation, Joanne repeatedly told the investigating gardai that her baby was buried in a field on the Hayes family farm.

A cursory check by gardai did not yield anything.

They assumed that the woman was lying. After she was charged, Joanne was remanded to Limerick prison while the rest of her family were given bail.

In the meantime, her sister Kathleen asked for precise directions to the place where the body of the baby was hidden.

Her brother Michael was able to find the baby's body within minutes. The gardai were immediately called to the scene.

Surprisingly, the gardai now accepted the validity of what Joanne Hayes had been telling them throughout her questioning. Without doubting the reliability or veracity of the confessions they had received, they now maintained that she had twins, and that she stabbed one infant and had the body thrown into the sea while she killed the other infant and buried this second body on the farm.

The theories that led to a tribunal However, blood tests later carried out by Dr Louise McKenna of the National Forensic Science Laboratory subsequently found that the two dead babies had different blood groups. Both Joanne and her lover Jeremiah Locke had blood group O. The baby found on the Hayes farm had matching blood type but tests on the Caherciveen baby found that it had blood group A.

The gardai then came up with a theory that Joanne had sex with two men with different blood groups within a short space of time and became impregnated by both . . . superfecundation . . . which is the conception of twins by two fathers. While theoretically possible, superfecundation, is so rare that it was thought to have been impossible in this case.

The murder squad wanted to pursue their case but the Director of Public Prosecutions insisted that it should be dropped. The charges against the Hayes family were withdrawn in October 1984.

Journalists Don Buckley and Joe Joyce obtained a copy of the garda file and report. They wrote a major investigative article about the case for a Sunday newspaper. This sparked a media frenzy over the way the Hayes family was treated in custody.

Following the failure of two internal garda inquiries, the government decided to hold a public tribunal of inquiry . . . headed up by Judge Kevin Lynch . . . into the controversy surrounding the arrest and charging of the Hayes family. The tribunal sat for 77 days, spread over five months. Its report was published in October 1985.

The report criticised the gardai for their handling of the case but ultimately exonerated them from any wrongdoing, particularly from extracting confessions from the Hayes family through any form of abuse or intimidation. The report also described members of the Hayes family as liars and perjurers and blamed them for everything that had happened to them.

Despite the lengthy nature of the tribunal, as many questions about the events in Caherciveen and Abbeydorney remain unanswered as they did 22 years ago. Authors and academics have tried to make sense of the events. Now many filmmakers are set to have a go. It remains to be seen if they will succeed in finding any more meaningful answers to what happened in Co Kerry in 1984.