Gardaí who removed a two-year-old Roma boy from his home in Athlone last October because he looked too fair-haired and pale-skinned, dismissed as irrelevant the fact that he was medically diagnosed as albino.

Racial profiling played a major part in the Garda handling of two cases in which Roma children were wrongly removed from their parents last October because of unfounded fears that they had been abducted.