Identical triplets a labour of love

An Irish couple has told of their astonishment at giving birth to natural identical triplets — at odds of more than 160,000 to one.

The girls — Beth, Shauna and Molly — already had a claim to fame by being filmed for RTE’s upcoming show, Births of a Nation, when they were in the womb and after they arrived into the world by caesarean at Holles Street in February.

But now DNA results have confirmed the three 10-week-old daughters of Gráinne Coleman and her husband Rory are completely identical — with Shauna’s freckles and their differing weights the only surefire ways of telling the pretty baby girls apart.

Mum Gráinne, who also has a 16-month-old little girl called Mia, said her instinct told her that her triplets were identical.

“It’s extremely rare. They are natural or what they call spontaneous and I’ve come across odds of two million to one.

“We knew Shauna and Beth were identical because they shared the same placenta but we didn’t know with Molly. But we got the DNA results last week from swabs of their cheek which confirmed they were all identical.

“They all came from the one egg. Apparently with identical triplets they will share everything, the same hair eye colour, the only thing that will be different is their fingerprints. We are over the moon. Life will never be the same.”

The triplets were born by caesarean at Holles Street in Dublin on 20 Feb at 33 weeks and five days when Gráinne went into labour.

“Shauna was four pounds, Molly fours pounds two ounces and Beth four pounds six ounces.

“It was great. They didn’t need any oxygen and went straight into incubators and within 24 hours they were bottle feeding. Beth and Molly came home after nine days and Shauna came home after 11 days.”

Even though they are literally like three peas in a pod, their 35-year-old mother said they show distinctly different personality traits already.

* Births of the Nation will be shown on RTÉ One tonight at 9.35pm.