Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business

Author:Mike Milotte
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: New Island Books
Published: 2014-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

8. A Very Grave Offence

On the 19th of January 1965, Mary Keating, midwife and proprietress of St Rita’s private nursing home in south Dublin, was convicted in the Dublin District Court for what was described at her trial as a ‘very grave’ offence. Over 30 years after the event, Dr Karl Mullen, the gynaecologist and celebrated hero of 1950s Irish rugby, recalled that Mrs Keating had been prosecuted for ‘selling babies to America’. It was an erroneous, but highly revealing, recollection from someone who was personally close to Mrs Keating and who had attended her trial as a potential character witness. Someone else in court that day was future TD, Senator and Lord Mayor of Dublin, Joe Doyle, who for the past ten years had been Sacristan at Donny- book Catholic Church where Mrs Keating had her falsely registered babies baptised.1 Mrs Keating had, in fact, been prosecuted for forging the official birth register and uttering forged birth certificates with intent to deceive. Behind the seemingly technical charges, however, lay a much bigger story, for while Mrs Keating may not have been charged with selling babies to America, as Karl Mullen thought, it was certainly suspected that that was precisely what she was up to.

Mrs Keating’s name and that of St Rita’s were, of course, well known to the authorities. Back in the mid 1950s they had figured prominently in a Special Branch investigation into a Babies-for-export racket involving American airmen stationed in Britain. On that occasion the authorities had been more interested in keeping the whole business under wraps than in bringing the culprits to justice. On the second time around Mrs Keating was not so lucky, although the full story still never came out.

In 1959, a year after all the regulations regarding foreign adoptions had been standardised and tightened up, an American couple, Mr and Mrs Wedderburn, travelled to Dublin looking for a child to take back with them to the United States.2 They were introduced to Mrs Keating as someone who might be able to help. She promised to find them a little girl, as they had requested, and they went home with their hopes raised. But they were in for a long wait. After their return home to the States, the Wedderburns maintained a regular correspondence with Mrs Keating as weeks turned to months, and months to years. It was one indication of how difficult it must have been for the couple to adopt a child in America that they were prepared to wait so long to get one from Ireland. But finally there was good news from Dublin. Halfway through 1962 the Wedderburns received word from Mrs Keating that a baby girl had become available. The baby was born at St Rita’s on 16 June. Her mother was unmarried, but of good background, and was prepared to ‘disappear’ from the official records by not having the birth registered in her own name.

A month after the birth, on 16 July 1962, Mrs Keating forged the official

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