02.07.2014 Ireland: investigation confirms ethnic profiling leading to child removal

Several Irish and British newspapers report the results of an investigation by the Irish ombudswoman for Children – Emily Logan – regarding the child removal by Irish authorities. In the two studied cases, children were taken away from their Irish Rroma parents because they were blond, but the parents are dark-haired. After DNA tests confirmed the biological parenthood, the children were returned to their parents. The authorities took away the children last October, shortly after a blonde Rroma girl was removed from a Rroma camp in Greece. The case confirmed racial prejudice of Rroma being child traffickers, but also proved to be unfounded. The Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, the justice minister Frances Fitzgerald, and the Irish police commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan apologised for the inappropriate behaviour of the Irish authorities. Such an incident should not happen again and one is striving to implement improvements in the training of police officers: “Ms Fitzgerald also met with the families privately and issued a personal apology. “We regret the pain that they went through,” she said. “It happened out of a determination to protect children, but that determination got skewed.” The Government has pledged to implement a range of recommendations – such as cultural training for gardaí and better information-sharing – aimed at ensuring such a mistake does not happen again” (O’Brien 2014). The incident has left a large uncertainty among those affected. A seven-year-old girl, fearing to be taken away from her parents again, has dyed her hair black. The parents of the two-year old albino boy were in a state of shock and despair for a long time. One of the two families has taken legal action against the authorities. The minister of justice meanwhile announced that it was open to a compensation of the families. In a personal statement, the ombudswoman Emily Logan explains the process of her investigation. She comes to the conclusion that the actions of the Irish police officers were prejudiced and clearly guided by ethnic criteria: “After interviewing 42 people and weighing up the information, I concluded that the readiness to believe that Child A, a two-year-old boy, might have been abducted exceeded the evidence available and was tied inextricably to the fact that his family was Roma. Whatever doubts gardaí had in relation to the boy should have been decisively put to rest when his father informed them the toddler had albinism” (Logan 2014). In the case of the seven-year-old, blond Rroma girl, a combination of misinformation by the hospital, where the girl was born, the past experiences of a police officer and again ethnic profiling led to the child’s removal. Logan complains that the officers were asserted in their prejudices by the case of the Greek Rroma girl (compare BBC News 2014, Logan 2014 II/III, Phelan/O’Connor 2014).