Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (11 page)

Marie Keating went on to explain what this could mean. ‘Of course if that happens,’ she wrote, ‘we will not be able to get the baby as in the hospital she would be under the authorities, the same as in England as we now have an adoption law here. In our home we would register the baby in your name, but in the hospital the babies are registered in their Mothers (sic) name.’ This was a clear and unambiguous acknowledgement that St Rita’s operated outside the law by falsely registering the details of children born there. Marie Keating also revealed the utterly haphazard nature of matching children with would-be adopters: ‘Mammy said to tell you,’ she assured Mrs Autry, ‘if you do not get this Baby, that the very next one you shall have, and when she comes out of hospital she will see about it for you... we will get you one very soon.’
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And so they did.

Before the end of the month Mrs Keating called Mrs Autry and told her to come immediately: a baby had become available, a boy whose unmarried mother, Mrs Keating said, was a singer, and whose natural father was a policeman. But when Mrs Autry arrived it turned out that ‘her’ baby was too sick to travel. She had to spend the next week residing at St Rita’s while the baby, whom she named Eugene (Gene), was kept in a box next to a heater. In the meantime, Mrs Keating registered the baby’s birth, giving Wesley and Mary Autry as his parents’ names. And to make it appear that Gene was born after Mrs Autry entered Ireland – which was essential if the deception were to work – Mrs Keating also falsified Gene’s birth date, entering 24 March 1953 in the register when, as the Garda investigation later discovered, he had actually been born on 7 March. In later years Mrs Autry told Gene she paid nothing to Mrs Keating other than the fees associated with her own and the natural mother’s stay at St Rita’s.

When baby Gene was well enough he was baptised at the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook as though he were the natural child of the Autrys – just as the Harden babies had been before him – but whether or not the Parish Priest, the Very Reverend Timothy Condon, was party to the deception is unclear. During Reverend Condon’s time at the Donnybrook Church (1950-1962), virtually all the falsely registered babies from St Rita’s were baptised there. And in 1954, the year of the (first) Garda investigation into St Rita’s, Donnybrook Sacred Heart Church had got a new Sacristan, Joe Doyle, then just 18 years old but in later life a Fine Gael TD, Senator, and Lord Mayor of Dublin. Joe Doyle remained as Sacristan in Donnybrook for 28 years, relinquishing the post only when he was elected to the Dáil in 1982. Mr Doyle developed a close friendship with Mrs Keating but, when approached by this author, he angrily refused to discuss what he knew of her illegal business.

Although they had baptised baby Gene a Catholic, neither Wesley nor Mary Autry were Catholics and, according to the Garda investigation, both were divorcees from previous marriages. The Garda investigation also revealed that baby Gene Autry’s natural mother used a false name – Power – during her stay at St Rita’s, and although they quickly discovered her real name, no one in authority saw fit to correct the false information in the Register of Births where, by law, the natural mother’s name must appear. Instead, the name ‘Autry has been allowed to remain indefinitely on the public record. And this was done not just in the Autry case but in all eight cases investigated by the Gardai in 1954.

Within days of baby Gene’s false birth registration and baptism, Mrs Autry took him back to the UK, where she and her husband were subsequently interviewed by officers from the Irish Special Branch. They lived in constant fear that their baby would be taken from them and sent back to Ireland, and they spent the next two and a half years in the UK desperately trying to resolve the mess their association with Mrs Keating had got them into. Although the Irish authorities never issued a passport so Gene could be taken legally to the United States, as we will see, the Autrys – along with the other Air Force couples involved in the Garda investigation – found a way around this obstacle, to the great annoyance of Irish officialdom.

Another of the cases that Detective Inspector Flaherty investigated involved a Major Burns of the US Air Force. Major and Mrs Burns had acquired no less than three children from St Rita’s, a boy and twin girls. The American couple appear to have met the expectant Irish mothers of these children in England, through the Crusade of Rescue and Homes for Destitute Catholic Children. An English priest attached to this organisation provided them with an introduction to another priest in Dublin, and he in turn put

Mrs Burns in touch with Mrs Keating at St Rita’s. Mrs Burns then arranged the repatriation and confinement of the unmarried women concerned and paid all their expenses, including Mrs Keating’s bills. The whole operation had the appearance of a well worked-out system based on an intricate network of contacts in Ireland and Britain. Major and Mrs Burns acquired their three children on two separate visits to St Rita’s – in October 1952 and November 1953. As with baby Gene Autry and Lynda and David Harden, all three children were registered as the Burns’ own natural children, eliminating the real mothers from the record. They took the children back to the American Air Force base at Ruislip in West London where Major Burns was stationed.

Once the conspiracy was uncovered by the American embassy in Dublin, and when the Special Branch had completed their investigation, Major and Mrs Burns, like all the other couples involved, were told not that they faced prosecution for potentially serious criminal offences, but that they had to apply in the normal way for Irish passports for their illegally acquired children. It was the beginning of a long and sometimes bizarre religious inquisition for the Major and his wife in which the Irish State acted – aggressively and with seeming relish – as the thought-police of the Catholic Church.

The Irish natural mothers of the three Burns children were Catholics, and so the Department of External Affairs undertook to satisfy itself that the Burns couple would bring the children up in the Catholic faith. The new Adoption Act made no reference whatever to such conditions being met by intending foreign adopters before passports would be issued to their selected children. This was a condition inserted entirely by the Department. But the manner in which the Department dealt with the Burns’ application for passports indicated that the Irish civil servants, and their Minister, Liam Cosgrave, were determined to apply Archbishop McQuaid’s religious tests as though they had the force of law – while, bizarrely, ignoring the actual
breaches
of law.

When the Department received the required documents from the Major and his wife in support of their passport applications, the officials immediately rejected their marriage certificate because it was a civil document, not a Church one. They also demanded Major Burns’ baptismal certificate and a reference from the couple’s Catholic pastor in America recommending the adoption of the three children ‘from the religious point of view’.
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The ‘problem’ was that Major and Mrs Burns were a mixed-marriage couple. She was a Catholic, he a non-Catholic. And there was another obstacle: Mrs Burns had been married previously and had failed to produce evidence of how her first marriage ended, leaving open the possibility that she had been divorced. What relevance this had for the future well-being of the children was not specified, but it was seen by Department officials as a fundamental obstacle in the way of the Burns’ application.

With so many obstacles in their path, the Burns couple had become deeply frustrated. So much so, they engaged a barrister, William Fitzgerald SC (a future Irish Chief Justice), who contacted the Minister for External Affairs, Liam Cosgrave, in person.
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Cosgrave, in turn, demanded to know from his civil servants what was going on. They explained the background: that the children had been obtained illegally, that the law had been broken by Major and Mrs Burns as well as by the children’s natural parents, and ‘very probably also’ by St Rita’s Nursing Home. They confirmed that the Department of Justice had decided not to prosecute because it had been the American authorities who brought the matter to their attention, and, as we have seen, the American embassy wanted the entire affair hushed up.
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But it was the religious issue that was the real drawback, the Minister was told. ‘We must feel morally certain that these children will receive a proper upbringing in... the Catholic religion,’ his officials said. ‘It is true that Major and Mrs Burns have submitted a sworn declaration to the effect that they will bring up the children in the Catholic Faith,’ they went on, ‘but this is, of course, not sufficient for our purposes.’ The word of the American couple could not be relied on. By obtaining children illegally, Major and Mrs Burns had already proved themselves to be untrustworthy, raising doubts about their suitability ‘for the adoption of Irish Catholic children’.
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Mr Cosgrave’s private secretary, however, took a different point of view and strongly recommended to his Minister that he issue passports for the three children involved, even though the Major wasn’t a Catholic and had married in a registry office. Referring to the Burns’ own oath-bound undertakings to bring the children up Catholics, and to their seemingly excellent character references, the secretary concluded, somewhat philosophically: ‘It would be impossible to obtain more satisfactory evidence. To adopt any other standard would be to pursue an impossible perfectionism and to seek for criteria unobtainable in this imperfect world...’ And more prosaically, ‘... moreover, it would be to place an impossible burden on the limited staff of our consular section...’ As for worries that because of their civil marriage Major and Mrs Burns could some day divorce, the private secretary pointed out they could just as easily be killed in an accident or die young, and so ‘we should not concern ourselves with unnecessary and futile speculation about a future which no man can control.’ He ended by reminding his minister of something that no one else had given any thought to: as the children had been in the Burns’ care since birth, one and two years ago, ‘a strong bond of affection’ had been formed and it would be ‘an unbearable hardship’ to break the family up at this point by refusing passports to the children.
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Mr Cosgrave remained unconvinced and ruled that unless the Major and his wife could produce all the religious proofs demanded, no passports would be issued.
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In the event, they could not produce a Church marriage certificate as they had only had a civil wedding. Nor could the Major turn up a Catholic baptismal certificate since he wasn’t a Catholic. However, Mrs Burns did produce sworn declarations to the effect that her first marriage ended with the death of her husband, and not with divorce. ‘This removes one of the main anxieties which we had,’ noted a Department official.
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But the Burns couple were still far from being in the clear.

Unable to obtain a recommendation from a Catholic pastor who knew them in America, they produced instead a reference from a London priest, Father Keane. But when this arrived in the Department of External Affairs early in January 1955, on unheaded notepaper, the officials became so suspicious they asked the Irish embassy in London to check out the priest’s credentials. There followed a series of ‘urgent’ and totally bizarre telexes between Dublin and London, desperately trying to confirm that Father Keane actually existed and that his reference was genuine.
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The London embassy found a full entry for Father Keane in the Catholic Directory, but Dublin was still unhappy. ‘The main point,’ they emphasised to their London staff, ‘is that Major Burns is not – repeat not – a Catholic.’ As the whole business had become ‘red hot’, the Irish diplomats in London were told to track down Father Keane as a matter of ‘top priority’ and contact him in person. If they found he really did exist, they were told to avoid implying that they ever doubted the authenticity of his letter and to ‘throw the blame’ for their intrusion ‘on the regulations’. But ‘the main thing’ was ‘we must be absolutely sure that Father Keane recommends these adoptions from the religious point of view’.

Father Keane may have been surprised to find himself confronted by professional diplomats from a supposedly modern democracy conducting a religious inquisition into the private beliefs of an American citizen, but Keane had no hesitation in standing over his ‘spiritual’ recommendation, expressing himself ‘fully satisfied about the future of the children in that respect’. He had known the Burns couple for three years; Mrs Burns was a regular church attender; the Major was an upstanding man, taking an interest in Catholicism and wishing to start instruction. What was more – although to the Irish inquisitors this was apparently irrelevant – the children were dearly loved and extremely well cared-for.
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After a six-month-long investigation of the Major and Mrs Burns’ spiritual suitability (and nothing else) it was time to close the file. ‘We have now reached the point where we must decide these applications on the basis of the information and references available to us,’ one official wrote.
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The strong recommendation from Father Keane had encouraged the Department to look at the case more favourably. It hadn’t been mentioned before, but now it helped enormously that the ‘Catholic party in the marriage was the mother since ‘in the nature of things a mother is always more closely connected with the religious education of children than a father’. The couple’s apparent dishonesty, once a barrier to adopting, was now a factor demanding sympathy. They had both told their families back in America that during their British posting Mrs Burns had given birth to three children. To deny passports to these children now would cause the couple severe embarrassment with their relatives. And, as a final seal of approval, it was noted that ‘the Archbishop of Dublin has approved the adoption of a Catholic child by parents of whom one was not a Catholic’. If the Archbishop could do it, why not a mere government minister? Finally, it was noted that a denial of passports would deprive the children of ‘their comfortable home,’ and by splitting up the family, impose ‘a great hardship’ on them.
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