Gardaí arrest woman in 30s over abandoned baby hoax calls

A SINGLE woman in her 30s suspected of making calls that sparked the three-day search for a non-existent newborn baby was arrested in Mullingar last night.

The woman, a serial hoaxer who is the mother of five children, was taken to Mullingar Garda Station where she was detained under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984.

She faces up to five years in prison if charged and convicted of wasting Garda time and resources.

Calls made to a north Dublin garda station were traced to a mobile phone owned by the woman living in the midlands.

But gardaí are still pursuing a number of other lines of inquiry. They have to establish for certain that the woman made the calls from the mobile phone to the station and that she was the person who initially contacted a helpline on Monday morning.

At this stage, it is believed one person made all the calls.

The woman is reported to have made similar distress calls in the past, both here and in England. She faces a maximum five-year sentence if convicted under 1976 legislation, or up to 12 months if tried before a District Court. The total cost of deploying dozens of officers around the clock over three days is thought to run to tens of thousands of euro. The woman faces a charge of knowingly making a false report causing garda time and resources to be wastefully employed.

However, gardaí will want to establish whether the calls were made maliciously or whether the woman has psychiatric problems before sending a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Shortly after 9pm on Wednesday, gardaí established that the calls were not genuine and the suspect pretended she was a teenager in a highly distressed state.

The first call was made to the helpline at 2.40am on Monday. It was followed by a second call to the same helpline.

The woman claimed she had just given birth to a baby boy and had left him behind a sofa in an abandoned flat in Ballymun, north Dublin.

A third call was made to a second helpline at 8pm on Tuesday and was followed by at least two calls to Ballymun Garda Station, one lasting only a few seconds, another two minutes’ long.

Gardaí initially treated them as genuine. She sounded distressed and upset on the mobile phone line, but did not stay on longer than two minutes.

While searches continued through Wednesday, gardaí were also carrying out separate investigations based on the calls made to the Ballymun station.

By early evening, they had established the calls originated from outside Dublin and that they had been made from a phone owned by a woman with a history of making hoax calls. Senior gardaí said they had to treat the initial calls as genuine and keep searching until it was established for certain they were “not genuine”.

Justice Minister Michael McDowell praised gardaí for their efforts and professionalism in dealing with the matter.

Mr McDowell said everyone was relieved that there was no abandoned baby, but added the efforts of the many garda officers involved in the search would further raise the esteem of the force.