" I BELIEVED for years that it was best that the shop should be closed and the key thrown away but I was wrong. It's not as simple as that."
Once an adoption had taken place, he used to believe it was best to shut the door on the past.
Mr Tom Woulfe is chairman of St Patrick's Guild, the adoption society which has come under intense criticism this week from adoptees given misleading information" about their birth mothers.
"Allegations are being made that are wild," he said, adding that he did not wish to speak about St Patrick's Guild but that he hoped a meeting of the committee would take place this week.
Mr Woulfe is better known to the public, and particularly the sporting public, as the GAA man who campaigned for an end to the ban on members paying, or even attending, "foreign games.
He became the first registrar of the new Adoption Board in 1953 and continued in the post until 1979.
He later joined the management committee of St Patrick's Guild" when Sister Gabriel, who retired some weeks ago, was the sister-in-charge.
She was succeeded by Sister Francis Ignatius.
"We were living in a society 56 years ago where the accent was on concealment," he says of the attitude to birth outside wedlock.
"The prevailing view at the time was that once the order was made that was the end of it but that's not the view now."
He himself believed at the time that it was best, once an adoption had taken place, to shut the door on the past or that "the shop should be closed and the key thrown away", as he puts it.
Now, he say's, he believes that "it's natural that they should want to know what their background is. I fully appreciate that.
But the issue remains complex, he argues. "What do you do if the mother doesn't want to disclose it? I can see no solution.
"If an adopted person comes to the society and the society makes contact with the mother and her answer is `yes', there's no problem. If the mother says `no way' then you have a problem. You have an insoluble problem."
He remembers getting a letter in the 1970s following an RTE debate about access to information.
"The message that came across from the letter was this: I gave the child up before I got married. I am now happily married with five teenage children. I would prefer to spend my eternity in hell rather than that my husband and family should know about this."
He remembers the delicacy of trying to trace mothers without their husbands finding out they had had a child before they married.
"We were skating on very thin ice then."