The Mystery of Maura

Pretty Maura Lyons was 15 years old and a member of Northern Ireland's Roman Catholic minority (34.2%) when she went to work a year ago as a stitcher in a Belfast garment factory. There she met several members of a splinter sect known as the Free Presbyterian Church, and soon she became a Protestant. Her father, a shipyard worker, and her mother were horrified; so was the parish priest. There were family conferences, prayers and tears. Then Maura Lyons disappeared.

Abduction! cried her family and their Catholic friends, and they accused the Rev. David Leathern, who had converted Maura, of spiriting her away. Free Presbyterian Leathern denied any knowledge of the girl's whereabouts, and so did Alan Paisley, moderator of the church. But Paisley eventually produced what he said was a tape recording of Maura's voice, and played it to an audience consisting of all of Belfast's 1,000 Free Presbyterians, Maura's family and the police. "My Roman Catholic religion had been fear and dread," said the voice. "The new religion to which I was introduced was simple and free from fear." Three priests had been called in, and she was about to be carted off to a convent. "I took the opportunity to escape while the priests were having a cup of tea . . . I am in God's hands.''

But that was not Maura's voice at all, said her father, and the Catholic accusations and Free Presbyterian counteraccusations went on and on in Belfast, The controversy bounded across the Irish Sea when Reporter Norman Lucas of London's News Chronicle (circ. 1,252,778) wrote a story of a "secret rendezvous" he had had with Maura in northwest England, "to which I had been driven in a closed car--blindfolded for the last 20 minutes . . ." She had been flown to England and smuggled in and out of about 25 houses in 18 weeks, wrote Reporter Lucas, constantly changing her hair style and clothes. Maura told him that she would stay in "this Protestant underground" until May, when she would become 16 and in British law no longer a minor.

"There is an underground method of dealing with this girl which rivals those operating in occupied countries during the war," said Republican Labor M.P. Harry Diamond, a Catholic, in Northern Ireland's House of Commons. "There have been evasion, lies, attempted blackmail and an obvious conspiracy." While police of the United Kingdom searched for her, a Protestant leader said: "There is no official underground to hide girls like her, but because so many people believe in freedom of worship there are many families who would be willing to hide her."

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