Mum of abducted boy: ‘We are just being sent from pillar to post’

Standing outside the Egyptian embassy, Norma Heeney looked like she couldn’t take anymore: “Enough is enough,” she said.

It’s four years now since Norma had her son, Faris, at home with her in Clonsilla in West Dublin.

In July 2009, her ex-partner’s family abducted the then two-year-old Faris, dressing him up as a girl and using a cousin’s passport to get him to Egypt.

The uncle, Mostafa Ismaeil, who squirrelled him out of the country, is serving a six-year sentence in Portlaoise Prison for the offence, but the Heeney family are nowhere nearer reuniting with Faris as Egypt is not a signatory of the Hague Convention which provides a legal framework to resolve international abduction cases.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has been providing “consular assistance” to the family but any diplomatic efforts have borne little fruit. The family met with Egyptian diplomats in Dublin yesterday and is due to meet with Francis Fitzgerald, the Children’s Minister, next week, but they are scathing about the Government’s failure to work with the Egyptians to return Faris to his mother.

Norma’s mother, Marian, said they feel “very let down” by the Government and warned that she will chain herself to the Dáil gates “if that’s what it takes”.

The family met with Egyptian embassy officials on six occasions over the past four years and with the Department of Foreign Affairs on numerous occasions, but claim “we are just being sent from pillar to post”.

“We have had two and three line letters just confirming your email, letter, call saying ‘we will get back to you’. One passes it to the other department saying it’s nothing to do with them,” Marian said.

The Department said the Tánaiste has raised the issue with his Egyptian counterpart twice and officials have met with the Heeneys “a number of times are and ready to meet them once again at their request”.

Meanwhile, Faris’s uncle is due for release next April while his father, Amir, is rearing the little boy in Tanta, north of Cairo. Amir is still wanted in Ireland on a charge of sexual assault.