For a year the father had obeyed the court. He had daily access to his two children and that appeared to suffice. But then came that terrible day when she came home to find a note saying he had gone back home to Turin - with the children.
The nightmare began. A struggle over custody is one thing in one's own country, quite another if has to be conducted in another jurisdiction, through another language, and putting one's faith in people whose instinct is probably to distrust a foreigner.
It would take months of stopstart tangles with the Italian legal system, threats from her former husband to both herself and the children, the involvement of police, social workers, an NGO called Reunite, diplomats, judges, and an Irish MEP. But in the end she won her children back.
She collected them from a Turin hospital where they had been sent by their father who was threatening suicide, and drove home to England to begin her life again.
Last year in Ireland the authorities had to deal with 125 cases of child abduction. Fifty-six of them were abductions from the state to another (in three out of four cases the UK) while in 69 cases a child was brought to the state from abroad.
In theory the law governing abductions is relatively straightforward. The Hague Convention, agreed in 1980 and now signed by some 162 countries, provides that custody of a child will be determined by the court of the country where he or she is habitually resident and where the signatories agree to enforce that court's decisions.
Last week the convention's provisions were significantly strengthened when EU justice ministers agreed another convention, "Brussels II", on the mutual recognition of divorces.
Yet, if it was that simple the work being done by Ms Mary Banotti, Dublin's Fine Gael MEP, would be no different from that of any other MEP. Instead, as special representative of the Parliament on the issue, she has had to become involved in over 45 painful international tug-of-love cases, some dozen involving heavy personal engagement, evidence of the widely different standards of application of the convention.
British and Irish courts, she says, are among the best and fastest at recognising their obligations - speed is essential to minimise psychological trauma to the abducted child - with the result that many children brought to both countries will be sent back to their legal guardians quickly. It's not as easy in the opposite direction.
The job of "President's Mediator for Transnationally Abducted Children" had its origins in the work of the last Parliament, arising from protests by French mothers over abductions of children to Algeria. Ms Banotti, a member of the Petitions Committee, took up the mantle with a passion as cases began to pile up.
From social worker to MEP to social worker, Ms Banotti is sanguine about her role. The Irish political system puts a high premium on direct contact between politicians and people. That's the way you get elected.
Her emphasis is on personal contact immediately with the families, lawyers and diplomats involved. In the case with which this article opened she rang the judge directly to arrange an immediate meeting with the wife who had travelled to Italy for a hearing, which proved to have been postponed. In another she travelled to Marseilles to participate in an agreed handover. With no contacts in yet another country, she rang the local Irish missionaries.
Although Ms Banotti does not have a statutory role and only one assistant, she uses the name of the Parliament to bludgeon her way through red tape. She makes no bones about the fact that on her own she solves little. With others she can be a factor in the solution.
On Wednesday, between routine parliamentary meetings, they dealt with a case in Sarajevo and an inquiry from Ireland from a woman who thought her estranged partner was about to do a runner.
What is her advice? It is that of Reunite - inform the local police that you suspect an abduction may happen. The passport can be stopped - far easier to prevent the abduction than get it reversed. Have recent pictures of the children. Even get them fingerprinted - the truth is that children grow and change with enormous rapidity.
However limited, it is a unique service provided by a parliament only too aware that it has difficulty engaging with the real lives of ordinary people.
