Recalling the Dublin baby snatching cases that had a happy ending

ALL shopping records were broken in Dublin in the run-up to Christmas 1954. In the midst of the hectic shopping bonanza, however, there was alarm when baby Patrick Berrigan was kidnapped the Saturday before Christmas.

His mother, Elizabeth Berrigan, parked the baby in his pram outside a shop on Henry St as she rushed in to buy the boy a teddy for his first Christmas.

Mrs Berrigan had been uneasy about leaving the pram unattended, because just two months earlier another baby, Pauline Ashmore, had been kidnapped in Camden St, Dublin, under similar circumstances, and had not yet been found.