The body was baptised and buried quietly. In Ireland taboo surrounds an illegitimate birth and 'exposure' of the infant is a time-honoured way of avoiding social stigma. But the 28 stab wounds sent Superintendent Daniel O'Sullivan and the Tralee police off on what seemed like a routine search for a deranged mother.

Ten months later, a State judicial tribunal is still sitting in Tralee with 10 barristers, scores of witnesses and what seems like the whole of the Irish media camped out in the town. In Dublin, the government of Dr Garret FitzGerald may still be thwarted in an attempt to deal with the kind of sexual problems posed by the tribunal. And from Armagh, Cardinal O Fiaich and the Roman Catholic hierarchy glower at the Dail in the most serious confrontation between Church and State in recent times. To all of this the youngest population in Western Europe directs its opaque, unblinking gaze as it has already decided about sex and the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, the case of the Kerry babies provides an unrelenting tragic Greek chorus.

Historians are already marking the case as a watershed in Irish social history. The tribunal has touched on all the most cherished shibboleths of Irish life and everything it touched fell apart or was found flawed. The Irish family that prays together did not stay together.

These six weeks of the Tralee tribunal have dragged Ireland from a feudal reticence on sexual life into a marathon debate.

The first act opened quietly. The local police were looking for a woman who had been pregnant but had no baby to show for her labours. Their stolid line of inquiry read like a country casebook in an Agatha Christie with an Irish setting: tinkers, unmarried spinsters, bucolic adulterers and young women who had been visibly pregnant and had "gone to England" -- an Irish euphemism for abortion.

It was not long before they had the perfect suspect. Joanne Hayes, 25 years old, an unmarried mother who lived on a 60-acre farm at Abbeydorney, her mother Mary, older brother Ned, unmarried older sister Kathleen and younger "slow" brother Mike -- a family that seemed drawn from an anthropologist's textbook of family farming folk in Co Kerry.

Joanne Hayes, it was found, had been treated at Tralee General Hospital for postnatal haemorrhaging but had no baby to show for it. She had also been having an affair with a young married man, Jeremiah Locke who, like herself, was employed in the Tralee sports centre.

On the afternoon of May 1, Joanne, Ned, Kathleen, their aunt Bridie and their mother Mary Hayes were brought to Tralee garda station. By this time the murder squad had arrived from Dublin headed by Det-Superintendent John Courtney, a legendary figure in Irish police circles for his no-nonsense handling of political terrorists.

By midnight the entire Hayes family, with the exception of Aunt Bridie Fuller, had confessed to the murder of the Cahirciveen baby. The confessions contained graphic descriptions of how they had done it, sketches of the bedroom where the baby was born, the carving knife used to stab the baby and a bathroom brush they used to beat the baby, and the itinerary of Ned's journey with the body to Slea Head where he dumped it in the sea.

Joanne Hayes was charged with the murder of the Cahirciveen baby and her family with concealment of the birth.

Next morning Joanne Hayes told her sister Kathleen that she couldn't get the police to understand that on the night of April 12 she had given birth to a baby boy alone and unassisted in a field and, frightened, had left it in the hay for the night. In the morning it was dead. It was not, she insisted, the Cahirciveen baby.

Even the docile Hayes family felt that this story was worth a solicitor's attention. They went to a local lawyer, Patrick Mann. He took the story to the police who were unimpressed. They had already searched the farmlands at Abbeydorney and found no body. They trudged out again and found the body exactly where Joanne Hayes said it would be.

Now the police had a problem. Here was a dead but unmarked infant. But they had charged Joanne Hayes with murdering the Cahirciveen baby, indeed she had confessed to it. The whole Hayes family had.

They then proposed that Joanne Hayes had twins. She had given birth to the first in the field and had then gone into the house to find herself in labour once more. The second baby was the mutilated one washed up in Cahirciveen.

But there was another problem. The baby found in the field at Abbeydorney was blood group O, which was the blood group of Joanne and her married lover, Jeremiah Locke. But the Cahirciveen baby was blood group A.

Doggedly the police trooped to their last-ditch positions. It was just possible, they argued, that Joanne Hayes had become pregnant by two men around the same time. And this was their final stand to a deeply shamed family, when two deceptively mild investigative journalists Don Buckley and Joe Joyce arrived in Tralee.

Buckley and Joyce's deliberately low-key and acutely researched article in the Sunday Independent on October 14, 1984, aroused public opinion and secured immediate action. The Commissioner of Police ordered an internal police inquiry within 24 hours, the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped all charges and the Minister for Justice assured angry deputies in the Dail that if the police inquiry was not "satisfactory", he would launch a full judicial inquiry.

It wasn't and he did. On January 7, on one of the coldest days in winter, Mr Justice Kevin Lynch strode through the streets of Tralee in trilby and smartly cut Crombie coat with all the confidence of his father, IRA guerrilla commander Fionan Lynch, whose fief it had been during the Anglo-Irish war.

And so the second act opened -- the whole of Ireland avidly consuming the play, involved intellectually, angry and increasingly alienated from the most cherished conventions of Irish life.

This massive media interest was facilitated by the liberal comment allowed by Justice Lynch who clearly felt that this was no time for sub judice.

The stage was the unimposing redbrick offices of Tralee Urban Council. But the town had no difficulty in accommodating the huge media presence. Each year it is host to a popular festival of maidenly virtue known as the Rose of Tralee Festival. This vast assembly of virgins is normally graced by the James Last Orchestra and is a commercial celebration of probity -- a virtue that seemed conspicuously lacking in the diminutive figure of Joanne Hayes who sat, feet dangling inches from the ground, her slight body hedged and hemmed by the phalanx of 25 police officers whose careers are on the line and the crescent of 10 barristers.

None of these emotive images went unreported by the female journalists and the whole of Ireland switched off Dallas and took to newspapers to follow the drama.

The first star was State Pathologist Dr John Harbison. Veteran of countless bloody thickets and coppices, he confidently waved the toilet brush about, showing how it could be used to stab, bludgeon or crush. Then he blandly showed how it could scratch the back too.

Act two reached a rousing finale when Dr Louise McKenna of the State Forensic Centre gave a cameo performance as the cool female scientist. She primly demolished the police case that Joanne Hayes was the mother of the Cahirciveen baby. The blood groupings made it impossible. The curtain came down to a satisfied buzz from the audience. In Ireland it is not only far-left paranoiacs who like to see the police squirm.

In the interval, the audience discussed the historic week. A country renowned for sexual reticence had been treated to a crash course in obstetrics. A country where there is no sex education worth the name had the whole internal machinery of the lower female torso served up with the breakfast papers. On balance, it liked it and hoped there would be more. There was talk of a sexual revolution.

But act three proved the old adage about revolution turning bloody. On to centre stage strode the dark and formidable Martin Kennedy, counsel for the senior officers.

Mr Kennedy, a sensitive family man, had a tough job on his hands and he knew it. He went straight for the jugular. He asked one of Joanne Hayes's female married friends whether she had an after-work drink with Jeremiah Locke. Yes, she did. "A married man?" Yes. "Whom you knew to be having an affair?" Yes. "What did your husband think of that?"

It was fair warning. All over Ireland, Irish mothers' heads nodded, all the heads which had not nodded since the Second Vatican Council.

Mr Kennedy went around Kerry with Jeremiah Locke. He didn't have to leave court. He used a map and asked Locke to show him the by-roads and lanes where he and Joanne had sex in the red Mini which seemed adequate to their equally small persons. Mr Kennedy went into a lot of detail inside that squashed car.

Then he put Joanne Hayes on the stand and was relentless in discovering her private emotions, her first boyfriend, what she did with him, was she a virgin when she first made love to Locke, her little Mills & Boon fantasies with the groundsman at Tralee sports complex. "You hoped he would be your prince and take you away on a white charger and all your troubles would be over?" No, yes, sobbed the tiny girl from the threadbare farm and all over Ireland they sobbed too and the female journalists sobbed loudest and took out puce handkerchiefs and purple prose.

The media were baying with a vengeance. They and their readers wanted Kennedy to stop. They and their readers wanted it to go on. Stop! Go! cried circulation manager and Irish mother alike. Kennedy went on while all the nation wondered. Could Ireland stand these things being said and still remain Catholic.

But Kennedy continued a savage, unrelenting vindication of the tribunal's advocacy system: the night of the birth, where she put the afterbirth, Joanne Hayes is sobbing now, she runs from the court room as they sit and wait. Justice Lynch is kind but firm. It must go on. And it does, through Kennedy's sustained powerful crescendo of accusation to the hammer-blows of "not only were you not satisfied with stabbing the baby, but you beat it to death with a bath brush?" No, no, no, she cried. No, no no, the clergy of Ireland cried.

No, no, no, the politicians who had asked for the tribunal cried.

But nobody noticed that because the loudest crying was coming from Irish feminists, long famous for the warmth of their hearts and the later adjustment of their heads. From the day Joanne Hayes had taken the stand, busloads of feminists had arrived from all over Ireland. Each day she beat her way to the courthouse through a sea of yellow roses. Cries of support turned to cries of anger against Justice Lynch, against the tribunal, against the adversarial system of advocacy.

None of the feminists seemed to notice that the most anxious voices raised to halt the tribunal were those of the Roman Catholic Church authorities and their mainstay -- the Irish mother. A church which had elevated sexual silence to a cardinal virtue was shattered by a sexual spectacle of adultery, obstetrics and passion in a red Mini car. They were watching the forthcoming struggle with the government over the new Contraceptive Bill. They wanted Joanne Hayes off the stand too.

But the feminists in Tralee where the little girl was crying and the Sunday newspapers were screaming "They shoot horses, don't they?" in banner headlines, and nobody could put it all together. The feminists had transformed a young girl who had some kind of guilt about what happened on a night in April into a feminist martyr.

No one seemed to remember Shaw's St Joan, the flawed and hallucinating heroine. But one Shavian barrister in Dublin was reported worried. Patrick McEntee is also Ireland's only QC and unarguably the finest defence lawyer of the century. McEntee was reportedly worried about another Agatha Christie figure: the Aunt.

And so to the Jacobean act four with the aunt, Miss Bridie Fuller, a trained nurse, frail, ill and in a wheelchair but calm in her evidence. She was wheeled in to give her account of the night when according to the sworn evidence of Joanne Hayes, sister Kathleen, brother Ned and mother Mary, they either knew nothing about a baby or knew it had been born in a field much later.

Aunt Bridie was quite certain. The baby found in the field was born in a room at the top of the house. She had cut the umbilical cord. The child needed the mucus drained from its chest but the family had done nothing about that. The child had lived for some hours. Joanne had been alone with it and then it had died, how she did not know.

The intake of breath from the feminists and the media was heard all over Ireland. Two aunts, one a nun, rolled in to testify that Aunt Bridie had not the use of her senses. But the "slow" son, Michael, had already told Martin Kennedy that the baby was born in the top room. Like Aunt Bridie said.

In Tralee the feminists quietly packed their bags. Justice Lynch looked at the nun who swore Bridie had lost her senses like a sphinx. He grew more sphinx-like when he heard that Joanne Hayes had tried to have Bridie declared insane before the tribunal.

None of it need have happened if Jeremiah Locke or Joanne Hayes had free access to a contraceptive costing 20p. Technically Locke, being married, could have them supplied.

But the Minister for Health Barry Desmond sighed too. Then he brought in his Contraceptive Bill.

And down in Tralee the tribunal grinds on.