The government are set to apologise to Roma families accused of abducting children in two separate cases in Athlone and Tallaght where two children were wrongly taken away from their respective families.
Children’s Ombudsman, Emily Logan, today published a report on the cases which included a recommendation that the families involved receive an apology for the incidents.
The report highlighted a need for an official apology, saying: “In light of these considerations and in the interest of rebuilding trust with the Roma community, the inquiry believes that it would be appropriate for the apologies to the families of [the children] to come from the Minister for Justice and Equality.”
Since the report’s publication, Taoiseach, Enda Kenny has said that the government will issue an apology, stating: “It’s not acceptable that these events happened.”
The cases, which occurred last October, have been criticised by the Ombudsman: “To the extent [the child’s] ethnicity was so influential in determining the decision to remove him from the care of his parents, with no objective or reasonable justification, the actions of An Garda Síochána in this case conformed to the definition of ethnic profiling.”
The report also suggested that there was a lapse in sufficient evidence to accuse the families of abduction and that they stemmed simply from outside suggestions, influenced by the ‘Maria’ case in Greece earlier that year: “All that had been conveyed to the An Garda Síochána was a suggestion, based on an erroneous view of ‘Maria’ in Greece and an explicitly prejudiced view of the Roma community, that [the child] was abducted because she was blonde and had blue eyes.”
