Sensitive, high-profile case handled carelessly

The DNA testing process can typically take up to 48 hours, say the Forensic Science Laboratory — so it’s a safe bet there was some anxious pacing of corridors and hallways before the results in the Tallaght Roma case came in yesterday afternoon.

The case is not only an extremely sensitive matter, involving the well-being of a child, but it is also high-profile — a rare enough occurrence in circumstances where gardaí have utilised section 12 of the Childcare Act 1991.

That is the provision of the law — implemented in 1995 — under which gardaí took the girl, described as blonde and blue-eyed, from her Roma family in Tallaght on Monday evening.

Yesterday’s district court sitting, at which those DNA results were revealed, must have felt like a wonky reality TV show, were the issues at hand not so serious.

The manner in which the case was handled has raised eyebrows and heckles, with Martin Collins of Pavee Point questioning whether an element of “racial stereotyping” was at play. There does not seem to have been a child welfare issue, as the other children in the house were allowed to remain. The response of the gardaí, were they to provide one, would surely be that they would not get very far with their police work if they adopted a ‘hands-off’, overly cautious approach to any potential criminality.

One argument rapidly gaining currency is that the situation which unfolded in Tallaght, as well as the strange circumstances of a case in Athlone — where a fair-haired 2-year-old boy was taken from his Roma family on Tuesday night only to be returned to them yesterday morning — is that there is a witch hunt now taking place across Europe against the Roma community, with old stereotypes and scare stories back in vogue.

On yesterday’s Morning Ireland programme, Dezideriu Gergely, executive director of the European Roma Rights Centre, said he was concerned about the coverage of the Tallaght story, particularly the possibility of making a link between the Greek and Irish cases and “a number of assumptions” in public discourse in Europe that misrepresent the Roma.

“If these cases are not discussed from all angles possible, there is this trap to fall into that labels the whole community as being responsible,” he said.

“Reporting has to be based on facts and not assumptions based on Roma,” he said, adding that not all Roma are dark-skinned, and that many are blonde and blue-eyed.

This assertion echoed fears voiced by Martin Collins of Pavee Point in this newspaper yesterday regarding possible racial profiling in the way the Tallaght case was handled.

“Subjectivism” was the word he used, and he referred to at least one case in Serbia in which private individuals tried to take a child from a Roma family as they didn’t look as dark as the parents — an example of what he called “cases going on the wrong side”.

He added that many assumptions were made in the Greek case, including that of abduction and trafficking, without hard evidence.

He went further again, claiming there was a risk of prejudices being reinforced against Roma, including that they are stealing babies.

By yesterday afternoon, MEP Phil Prendergast was calling on the justice minister to open an investigation into the handling by the gardaí of two separate allegations of abduction against Roma families in Ireland, and Pavee Point agreed.

The lengthening shadow of the Madeleine McCann case is now stretching over the more recent happenings in Greece and Tallaght. The Greek case was quickly folded into the McCann case, the subject of a BBC Crimewatch programme a few weeks ago, while some media reporting on the Tallaght story also made the link. In this climate, might the gardaí have jumped the gun?

For years, some migrant rights groups have criticised what they saw as a lack of activity against child trafficking. To balance that, among those more likely to be trafficked are Roma children. The sight of some Roma begging on the street turns off a lot of people, but Pavee Point argues that Roma are also the victims of crime — one only has to think of the extreme savagery committed by Dublin criminals towards Marioara (Maria) Rostas, abducted on a Dublin street and subjected to a horrifying ordeal before being shot dead in 2007. Daily discrimination and a lack of education and opportunities were reasons put forward by Dezideriu Gergely for the impoverished lot of many Roma.

According to Sinead Kearney, a solicitor with Byrne Wallace in Dublin, the gardaí will provide answers for their actions in the Tallaght case and could claim that they legitimately formed the view they needed to act under section 12 and fulfil their statutory functions. But she added: “Would it have happened if the Greek case hadn’t emerged? Who knows?”

Second child case in Greece

Greek authorities have taken a second Roma child into care and detained a young couple over suspicions about the child’s parentage.

A 19-year-old woman and her 21-year-old husband were detained on the island of Lesbos yesterday after health workers became suspicious when they took the infant for emergency treatment at a local hospital.

Social workers raised the alarm after the couple first insisted the child was theirs but later claimed they had been looking after it for a family in Athens.

The man’s mother, who lived with the pair at a Roma settlement, was also detained.

A police spokesman confirmed: “We have three people in custody and are trying to determine the true parentage of the infant.” The arrests came after a Greek state prosecutor warned that further cases of child abduction and fraudulent registration were likely to emerge amid an investigation into all birth certificates issued across Greece in the past six years.

Efterpi Koutzamani, ordered the probe following the discovery of Maria, the blonde girl claimed by a Roma couple in Farsala as their own, after DNA test proved she was not their biological daughter.