‘No need to put a toy in a chocolate egg’

A REPORT on chocolate eggs with toys inside says the risk they pose to children is very low. But that’s of little comfort to Aileen Breslin.

Her three-year-old only son Roddy helped himself to one of the brightly-covered eggs in their local shop when she went in to pick up something for the tea.

"He had the cover half off and his mouth covered in chocolate when I discovered what he was at," she recalls.

She took it from him and when they got home her husband opened the capsule and put together the little toy lorry for him.

Roddy was delighted with it, but she refused to let him take it to bed. "He was real cute and when he knew I wouldn't let him take something to bed with him, he had a habit of taking it upstairs early and hiding it," said Aileen, who lives in Omagh.

On Sunday morning, when she was getting him up, he told her: "My lorry is all broken." Aileen discovered all the little pieces, collected them up and threw them out. The following morning they heard him crying at about 7.20am and found him on his back on the floor of his room coughing. They couldn't help him and he died a short time later.

The coroner found a tiny piece of the toy truck in his lung when performing the post mortem.

"The problem with these little pieces of plastic is that plastic does not turn up on an X-ray, so even if you suspect a child might have swallowed something, you can't check," said Aileen.

Shops in the area stopped selling the chocolate eggs and the court awarded the family £3,800 £1,000 of it for funeral expenses.

Roddy would have been 21 this year, yet despite other similar deaths, Aileen and other families have not succeeded in getting the kind of restrictions they want on the sweets.

The firm responsible, Ferrero, said it made changes to the product some years ago and there have been no deaths since. Aileen says that's not good enough. "I want to get them take out of sale altogether. There is no need to put a toy in a chocolate sweet. It's unnecessary," she said.