Cork mother calls for protocol on drink spiking after daughter taken to hospital during night out

Woman says her daughter was clearly not drunk but her pleas to have a toxicology test were refused

Cork mother says: 'All I want is a pathway that if someone presents in a hospital and if the doctors and nurses think there is a chance of spiking there, there has to be a protocol and a pathway and it has to be logged.'

A mother whose daughter is believed to have been victim of spiking during her Leaving Certificate results night out in Cork says a protocol on dealing with suspected spiking incidents is urgently needed.

The woman, who does not want to be named to protect her daughter, said she became aware her daughter had been taken to hospital by ambulance when she got a call from the girl’s friend.

“I honestly thought it was a joke,” she said.

The worried mother, accompanied by a friend, followed her teenage daughter to hospital and says she knew when she met her she wasn't drunk.

She added her friend, a nurse, agreed.

“She thought she had been given something or that she had taken something. I kept asking them to take bloods. She [my daughter] would wake up and she would start asking where was she and if anyone had touched her.

"She would go back off again. It wasn’t like when kids are drunk — she wasn’t vomiting, there was no smell of drink off her. None of that.” 

The mother said she became very frustrated in the hospital as all efforts to have toxicology tests failed. “In the end, they put her on a drip and it washed out of her system I guess, and by 7am it was like nothing had happened her. She had no hangover or anything,” she said.

She was speaking out after the Cork Sexual Violence Centre launched a campaign for spiking to be the subject of new, standalone legislation.

Currently, spiking by either injection or by putting a substance in a drink is an offence under the Non-Fatal Against the Persons Act 1997. The programme for government has promised the introduction of “stronger laws to combat the spiking of drinks”.

Garda figures show there were almost 190 incidents of spiking reported to them between January 2022 and December 2025.

Justice minister Jim O’Callaghan admitted last month there was no court data available in relation to spiking because it is not a standalone crime.

In relation to the campaign, the Cork mother said: “All I want is a pathway that if someone presents in a hospital and if the doctors and nurses think there is a chance of spiking there, there has to be a protocol and a pathway and it has to be logged.

“If my daughter had not been with her friends and an ambulance picked her up, she would have been in the hospital on her own with nobody watching her. It is life-changing. My daughter, after a while, was fine. But it is always going to be at the back of her mind. And her friends were more traumatised to be fair — they were watching her being carted off in an ambulance.”