Kevin Laheen SJ and the Case of the American Adoption

A coercive controller

Suzanna Byrne was born in Dublin in the 1960s and was adopted by a prosperous Catholic couple, a process facilitated by the now notorious St Patrick’s Guild. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that in those days but Suzanna’s case was most unusual. Her mother was a 16-year-old American whose wealthy family were not Roman Catholic, but Episcopalian (the United States’ form of Anglicanism).

I am most grateful to Suzanna for contacting me after she had read my post about Kevin Laheen SJ, the child abuser who impregnated a married woman and destroyed her family. Suzanna’s birth mother was driven to the maternity hospital by Laheen on the eve of the birth. He was to remain a regular fixture in her life until well into her teens – and not a welcome or edifying one either.

It appears that the family of Suzanna’s mother, on finding that their teenage daughter was pregnant, immediately made plans to conceal the fact so as to avoid what they no doubt called scandal. Somehow they ended up speaking to an Irish Roman Catholic priest about the possibility of taking their daughter to Ireland under the pretence that she would complete part of her education there. As Suzanna says, “these people were well-known and very well-off”.

The priest contacted Laheen and he became the fixer in Dublin. It’s clear that he didn’t do so entirely for the good of his health: there was a substantial fee involved. (A member of the family that he destroyed has told me that he would take them on holidays and there was no shortage of money).

The American family arrived in Dublin, stayed for several months in one of the city’s grander hotels before moving into an apartment shortly before Suzanna’s birth. As she recounts, “money was never an issue.”

The baby’s adoption was arranged by St Patrick’s Guild but it seems likely that Laheen had chosen Suzanna’s adoptive parents very carefully. They needed to be people of substance and to be prepared to give the little girl a good Christian upbringing and, interestingly, Roman Catholicism was not an obstacle. Suzanna’s adoptive parents fitted the bill. She had a very happy upbringing although her father died when she was only ten.

Laheen was a regular visitor. It seems that he was paid by the American family to keep an eye on the child and on her adoptive family. When Suzanna went to boarding school he dispatched three different women to check on how she was doing there. The fact that he delegated this task is probably explained by the fact that there had been a serious complaint about his behaviour when he conducted a retreat for the girls in a convent school.

He had not seen the family around the time of Suzanna’s father’s sudden death. “My mother and I were in Stillorgan Shopping Centre when we bumped into Laheen and he asked how my father was,” she told me. “When we told him what had happened he was very embarrassed and immediately started talking about money and how he could organise help. My maternal grandparents had been very wealthy, so my mother explained that money was not a concern.”

Suzanna always knew that she had been adopted. When she was in her early teens, Laheen would talk about his trips to America. On one occasion, he amazed her by saying “I love New Year in America. All the women skinny-dipping…”

A little later he said to her, without warning, “Your American grandmother died last week”. Suzanna replied that this was nonsense as she had been speaking with her adoptive grandmother only that morning. Gradually, Laheen would drop other mysterious hints and finally told her the whole story.

When Suzanna herself was 16 she became pregnant and Laheen was summoned to the family home. “He gave me a long lecture about morals and shame and what have you and then said that of course the baby would have to be adopted. I was adamant that I would not stand for that and my mother – although she always said that Laheen was a lovely man – backed me up.”

“He was far from a lovely man! He was a vain, malignant narcissist, he was a coercive controller, a roaring snob who was always cagey about his own background. He always had plenty of money and a very nice car. When I was well grown up I’d meet him occasionally in the Concert Hall, always with a different woman. These would be introduced as his sisters. I said once that he must have an awful lot of sisters!”

Suzanna settled for a time, with her son, in Belgium and when they would return on holiday to Dublin, Laheen would always call to her mother’s house and demand to see the young boy’s school reports as if it were somehow his right.

Suzanna’s adoptive mother, who was ten years younger than Laheen, died a year before him and left money to him to say Masses for her. At this stage, he was in Highfield, the private psychiatric hospital where we would expire aged 100 in 2019. When she inquired if the Masses had been said, she was told by a nun that they had.

This, as Suzanna says, was not the only time she had been lied to by a nun. A nun in St Patrick’s Guild told her that her birth family were “good Irish Catholics!”

Suzanna gave an interview about her adoption and subsequent events to Joe Duffy in 2013. You can listen here (and I strongly recommend you do). It’s at 34 minutes 4 seconds.

After I wrote the above account I was contacted by Brenda (not her real name) with her memories of Laheen. She stressed that she was only a little girl at the time she met him on several occasions, about eight or nine years of age. She came, as she says, from a working class family but they had neighbour, a very well-bred lady who was visited frequently by Laheen.

This is what she told me:

“When my mother saw his car outside - he always had a red sports car - she would insist on us going in. It wasn’t just that he was priest - and in those days the priests were seen as special - but he was glamorous. He was like a superstar. He even smelled of money, as I thought, but I later realised that this was his cologne. Of course, he had a clerical suit but it was no ordinary suit. It was fine tailoring and the cloth was exquisite. Every now and then you would catch a glimpse of an expensive watch”

“He would be sitting there by the window with a cut crystal glass of whiskey or brandy, totally relaxed, having a laugh with our neighbour. He’d be laughing and telling stories and you could tell that he always needed an audience, people to worship him, to perform for. And when we were going he would bless us and sprinkle us with holy water from a little gold thing about the size of a lipstick”.