Gardaí: Flight risk forced us to take Roma girl

Gardaí believed there was a risk the girl at the centre of the Dublin Roma case could have been removed from the country if they did not take her into care while her identity was being confirmed.

Regarding claims of racial profiling, the officer leading the case said the “only consideration of ethnicity” was his knowledge of other Roma and “new community” families in similar cases.

The Garda report into the Tallaght case, revealed to the Irish Examiner, said emergency powers allowing gardaí to remove children from families under section 12 of the Child Care Act were invoked 15 times in Tallaght in 2013. Nine were indigenous Irish, five were “new communities”, and one was Roma. It was used 24 times in 2012; one case involved a Roma family. Gardaí also referred 234 welfare cases to the HSE in 2012: 158 indigenous Irish, 28 Traveller, 20 African, eight European, and eight Roma.