The aim of this chapter is to focus specifically on those pregnant ‘unmarried mothers’ who travelled from Ireland to Britain to give birth ‘secretly’. How did social work and social welfare agencies respond to them once they had arrived? All migrant Irish ‘unmarried mothers’ were not, of course, repatriated back to Ireland and some women were successful in their plans to travel to England, give birth, have the baby placed for adoption and return home to Ireland. Here, however, the aim is simply to focus on a few of those Irish ‘unmarried mothers’ who were subjected to repatriation. The period covered by this chapter will largely be the late 1950s, when the initials PFI (‘pregnant from Ireland’) were part of the everyday vocabulary of the social workers that dealt with ‘unmarried mothers’ arriving from Ireland (O’Hare et al, 1983). Indeed, most of the case records discussed relate to women and children repatriated in 1958, partly because, on account of economic changes triggered that year, “sociologically 1958 dates the beginning of the contemporary period in Ireland” (Breen et al, 1990, p 5).

At least a dozen Catholic child adoption and rescue societies in England were involved in repatriation schemes (CPRSI, Annual Report 1959, p 2). Here, we will explore the case records of just one agency, the English Catholic Rescue Society (ECRS). This agency had a working relationship with the Child Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland (CPRSI) and the two organisations regularly liaised with each other about women and children being repatriated. This chapter begins by examining some of the case papers on the so-called PFIs and then comments on how more encompassing professional discourses on ‘unmarried mothers’ and child adoption were likely to impact on these women when they arrived in Britain. The final part of the chapter places the treatment of the PFIs in the context of other discriminatory discourses and practices concerned with Irish migrants to Britain.