IRELAND
Sunday Independent

Niamh Horan
Published 08/06/2014

‘The mother went absolutely hysterical. There was a big picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall, she pulled it off the wall and danced on the glass of it … ‘

‘Good! I have another bloody PFI … ! She came to us this morning! How soon can you take her?”

PFI stands for ‘pregnant from Ireland’ and this was the typical late-night call picked up by Fr James Good in the Fifties.

Now one of Ireland’s most eminent and outspoken theologians, Fr Good had been appointed as the head of an adoption agency to bring back babies who had been left by their mothers in England for adoption.

“They were normal, happy girls,” he recalls from his home in Douglas, Co Cork. “But ‘get rid of the baby’, that was the main idea. It was such a shame. All…