Big Read: ‘The priest said I could adopt a girl if I hid the unmarried mothers for a year – two years for a boy’

:: Josephine Groarke, who offered a haven to single pregnant women in the 70s, says she still feels their pain, writes Stephen Fernane

"You had to fall in with them as you couldn’t have kept them otherwise,' says Josephine Groarke, pictured in 1971. Photo: via Dominick Walsh

Stephen Fernane

It was in the late 1960s that Kerry woman Josephine Groarke discovered she couldn’t get pregnant. Married just a couple of years, upset and heartbroken – but determined to love and hold a child of her own someday – she contacted an adoption agency in Co Cork where a priest told her he would do what he could. Josephine was put on a waiting list.

In fact, the priest promised her a baby boy as soon as one became available.