Fr Ambrose Woods The Irish government expressed its concern about the loss of large numbers of men and women and even considered banning emigration, but that would have been a denial of human rights. It finally dropped its full restrictions on women seeking work abroad in 1946 and on men two years later, but thousands were already in Britain, demobbed or laid off and looking for future employment. They did not seem too keen to return. By 1947, Fr Ambrose Woods, a parish priest who had been involved in youth welfare work, had experienced at first hand the bewildered arrival of Irishmen and women into his parish in bomb-damaged Southwark, and knew only too well of the dangers that awaited them in a strange city. He had earlier approached the Irish government for help in setting up a hostel but was refused. In a speech a few years later, he described these dangers in the fairly lurid language of that time: "We must not think of the vast body of Irish emigrants as all alike. They differ from each other according to their age groups, standard and type of education, intelligence, the environment in which they grew up… In many instances the seeds of lapse from faith or morals are present before they leave their own parish in Ireland". The condition of young people was a concern then, as it is now. Ambrose Woods wrote; "One aspect of the problem merits special attention. I can only call it 'the murder of the Irish Innocents'. There are Irish fathers and mothers who send, or allow to go, to England their immature and uninformed children. At an age when their growing minds and bodies are still wide open to influences and experiences of any sort, and to ideas that will stay with them for life, they are sacrificed to Mammon. They are sent into the great cities and towns of England, into works and factories where the atmosphere is often materialistic, pagan and sometimes frankly immoral".