As a young idealistic student of theology at University College Galway in the 1970s, Dan Eiffe could hardly have imagined himself where he is today. A former Catholic priest, now married to a Sudanese woman and the proud father of eight-year-old twin boys, Eiffe has done more than most to bring the tragedy of Sudan to the world's attention.
Last month he organised for a group of journalists to be flown in to the Bahr el Gazal region of southern Sudan to report on a famine that threatens the lives of a million people. The subsequent flurry of media attention has in turn facilitated one of the biggest relief operations that part of Africa has ever seen.
Eiffe has spent the last 21 years helping Africa's most disadvantaged people. He was born in 1950, the son of a farmer, and grew up in Ratoath, Co Meath. One of 16 children, he was reared in a family held together by a traditional Catholicism.
In 1977 Eiffe was ordained a priest and posted to South Africa by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He was determined to make an impact, but church policy quickly disillusioned him.
"I felt that there was a lack of confrontation. In South Africa, I found the situation very hard to cope with. The church was doing very good and important work but I didn't fit in very well and I was asking too many questions. I remember saying to the Bishop: `This is a situation like Nazi Germany and here we are operating as if it's a normal society'."
By 1987 his conflict with the church authorities had reached boiling point. When asked by an aid agency to take up a position in war-torn southern Sudan, he sensed the opportunity to remove himself from what he saw as the church's narrow focus.
On arrival in Sudan, he was deeply shocked by the conditions he found there.
"Sudan made apartheid look like a tea party," says Eiffe. He was horrified too by the enormous resources available to the NGO community. Hercules planes were flying in relief from Nairobi on a daily basis at a cost of US$20,000 for every flight.
Eiffe approached the Overseas Development Agency and said: "For every one of those planes give me a tractor, a plough and a harrow, and I'll produce millions of dollars of food." He initiated an agricultural programme which yielded $3million of food a year and is still operational today.
But it was the events of the following year that were to radically change his life. He met and fell in love with a Sudanese woman, who became pregnant, forcing Eiffe to leave the priesthood. "My first reaction was panic. Here I was in the middle of Sudan, a priest and soon to be a father."
Eiffe took his partner to Nairobi, where she gave birth to twins. "When I walked out of the hospital with the two boys, my thinking went out the window and my heart took over."
He remembers the priesthood as a lonely life, and the issue of celibacy the most difficult to bear.
Eiffe threw himself into the secular world that he had long believed would better facilitate his idealism. "If I had remained a priest in Sudan, I wouldn't have the influence that I have today, and I would not be able to speak out in the way that I can now.
"I believe that I have a God-given mission to help these people. We are the only voice they have. When all the aid agencies were leaving Sudan, I stuck with them through thick and thin."
This enabled him to effect the release in 1996 of three nuns and two priests who had been detained by a rogue SPLA commander. A high-level delegation of church and Sudanese officials sent to negotiate their release were told they would be executed.
Eiffe picks up the story: "Five bishops came to my house and asked me to help. The missionaries had been treated very badly and had been beaten." He stormed into the commander's office. "I shouted at him. I told him he'd really screwed matters up. `You're finished,' I said. `The US will put sanctions on the SPLA and you'll be to blame'." Five days later they were released.
In January this year, Eiffe brought his wife and young sons to visit his family in Ireland for the first time. "I was very nervous before I went back. At the time I left the priesthood I received mixed reactions from my family, some of whom were very disappointed. But Ireland has changed an awful lot since I left 20 years ago, and when my family saw my beautiful boys they all melted."
Eiffe's passion is a resolute theme to his work in the Sudan conflict. In 1994 the BBC made a film about the war. Eiffe was the only western relief worker left in the area, and as the BBC was interviewing him refugees streamed over the hill behind them, fleeing their homes for the third time in as many years.
Eiffe turned back towards the camera, red-faced with anger. "This war has gone on too long," he told the reporter. "We've been pouring in beans, maize and oil, and we're not going to solve this bloody war like that. We need guns. We have to fight now, fight back and hit these guys."
Bellicose rhetoric aside, Eiffe believes he is still carrying out God's work albeit in a secular capacity. At the time of his ordination his chosen passage from the Gospel were the first words of Christ as a young man in the temple: "I have come to bring good news to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, and to set the prisoners free."
Eiffe comments: "That was my mission when I became a priest and it remains my mission today. The only thing to have changed is that I'm now implementing this mission, when as a priest in South Africa I wasn't. The work I'm doing today is more God's work than anything I have done before."