Gardaí deemed fact child was albino ‘irrelevant’

Gardaí who removed a two-year-old Roma boy from his home in Athlone last October because he looked too fair-haired and pale-skinned, dismissed as irrelevant the fact that he was medically diagnosed as albino.

The fact that his father told gardaí on the night he was taken that he was albino was not included in the Garda internal report into the incident, although two members of the force confirmed to the children’s ombudsman this information had been passed on.

It also emerged in the ombudsman’s report that the member of the public who contacted gardaí in October about the boy, Child A, had seen him with his parents at a festival in Co Clare three months earlier but only became concerned about him after hearing the Little Maria story from Greece.