Priest: 'We were fairly sure nuns weren't obeying laws'

By Niamh Horan
Sunday Independent
June 8, 2014

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/priest-we-were-fairly-sure-nuns-werent-obeying-laws-30337360.html

Three children, left, pictured sitting on the ground in the gardens of the Bessborough Sacret Heart Convent in Co Cork in the Fifties. Photo courtesy of Mari Steed.

'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 of ours [mothers in crisis] would have gone to England for one purpose only and that was to cover the pregnancy.

"We have no concept of the shame in those days of having a baby outside marriage. The family would often throw them out or – quite a few we had – her mother would take her to England and say, 'you stay there now until you get rid of it'.

"A parish priest would tell her, 'get out, you're a disgrace'.

"A man in those days did not exist. The technical description of the father of an illegitimate baby was filius nullius 'the child of no man'. If he didn't put his name on the birth cert, he didn't exist."

Now in his '90s, Fr Good sits in his study where he collects stamps and old coins, with the weight of those memories on his shoulders.

A lone voice against Catholic Church orthodoxy, Fr Good was the only priest in Ireland to object to Pope Paul VI's anti-contraception stance in 1968.

Fr Good personally oversaw the adoption of 954 babies to homes around Ireland.

"These things are only coming to light now," he says. "The Irish Government used to say around the 1950s that the total number of babies born in Ireland outside of marriage was about 1,700. I proved that 9,000 went to England every year. To cover up."

He met every mother on arrival. On cold grey mornings, he would stand at Fishguard port in Wales waiting for the 8am Innisfallen boat from Cork.

"We met the two of them at a time; we would take them to the nursery where the social worker would interview them to make sure they were doing it with free will. I would be there, filling in forms. Then we would give them money for lunch and drop them back into town."

The mothers were aged from 12 to 18 and had six months to change their mind, which also led to heartbreaking results at the other side. Nine babies in total were reclaimed under Fr Good's supervision within the legal time frame.

"One girl was 18 and we placed the baby in a home and she rang up and said, 'I want my baby back tomorrow'. I remember there was snow on the ground and I had snow chains, I was one of the few ones driving and I drove out to this couple who had the baby for a few months in their care.

"It was January 1, we went in and we said, 'we're sorry the mother has retained the baby'. The mother went absolutely hysterical. I always remember there was a big picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. She pulled it off and danced on the glass of it.

"People who had no babies and having got one, they were closer to it than if it were their own. We just had to take the baby and give it back to the mother."

A few miles away in Blackrock, the notorious Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork is at the centre of a storm of controversy over inordinately high child death rates there.

"We knew nothing at all," says Fr Good. "We kept away from Bessborough. We didn't want to be linked up with them as they were local babies. And we were fairly sure the nuns weren't obeying the adoption laws. Various things about the signing of consent. We just kept our distance.

"It is a bit complicated but the mother couldn't sign a final consent until the baby was placed in a home and over six months old and the consent to adoption was the sworn consent that the child was not less than six months old, having been born on such a date.

"And I have good reason to suspect that they were getting consent signed when the baby was only 10 days old. I advised them once or twice on legal issues and I felt that they were not obeying the law."

Speaking about the late Bishop of Cork, Bishop Cornelius Lucey's involvement, Fr Good adds: "It's the one thing that might tarnish his good work. He encouraged the nuns to send the babies to America, rather than keep them locked up. Now at the time you couldn't send a child to America under one year but the girls were only raring to get out of there and I wouldn't know, but I suspect a few dollars changed hands.

"I suppose all this history hasn't been covered. Up to about 1920, when a girl got pregnant outside marriage she was put into what we called the county home, St Finbarr's now, and locked up for life.

"With child," he says, "nobody wanted them."

Speaking about the growing storm over the remains of 796 babies and children believed to be buried near a septic tank in a former home for mothers and babies in Tuam, Co Galway, Fr Good says: "It's very hard to understand it, except that being so old now, in my childhood, poor people never had what we would call a normal funeral."

Referring to another institution, "one that's not generally known," Fr Good adds: "When a person died in St Finbarr's, it was the county home then, they were put into a sack and dumped in a hole up in Carr's hill on the way to Crosshaven. It was happening up to my lifetime."

The Adoption Rights Alliance has called for a public inquiry into all deaths of babies, children and mothers at mother and baby homes around the country.

Fr Good says he is happy to help any such inquiry, but cautions: "The problem we are facing now is that they are demanding adoption files to be opened. That will blow up marriages of all kinds. There are a lot of Irish men, if they found that their wives had a baby outside marriage, it would be a disaster."

On the overall future of the Catholic Church, Fr Good says: "It has to change. Priests are being wiped out, people today are not prepared to take on celibacy. The worst influence on it was St Augustine. He belonged to a sect called Manichean. He was 10 years there and they had two gods – the good god created the soul and the bad god created the body, therefore the body and sex is evil and the Catholic Church has never got that out of its system."

On the 4,000 to 5,000 girls still travelling to Britain each year for abortions, most still in secret, he says: "I'd prefer not to think about the whole thing, I don't think there's any solution. Strictly I suppose you are back to [the age old question], 'What is morality all about?'"