A Dublin woman has been convicted by a jury of abandoning her four-month-old baby outside a Tallaght pub while the child's father was inside drinking at the bar.
The 36-year-old woman, who cannot be named to protect the child's identity, had pleaded not guilty to wilfully abandoning the baby outside the Belgard Pub, Tallaght, on April 26th, 2003.
The jury of eight women and four men took more than 1½ hours to reach its unanimous verdict on the second day of the hearing at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
Judge Michael White remanded the woman on bail to allow for the preparation of a probation and welfare report but warned her that as she had been in custody due to a European bench warrant, she would be put in prison again if she failed to appear in court on the next date.
During the trial, Christopher Gaffney, a security man at the Belgard Pub, told Marie Torrens, prosecuting, that the woman left the baby there after she was refused entry to the pub and the child's father would not come out to speak to her.
Mr Gaffney said he was told by the woman, before she drove off in a taxi, that the baby had been fed and changed recently and that there was "an extra feed and change" in a bag she had left with the child.
He took the baby into the off-licence where he told the staff that she had been abandoned and to ring the gardaí. The staff then took her into the lounge and he left work as his shift had finished.
Mr Gaffney told Paul Greene, defending, that although the baby was left in his immediate vicinity and her father was 10 yards away in the pub, it hadn't "dawned on him" that the mother wanted the father to "face up to his responsibilities".
Mr Gaffney did not accept Mr Greene's suggestion that he had "expressed a positive willingness to transfer the custody of the child to the father" and denied that he said to the woman he would "keep an eye" on the baby until the father came out.
Det Garda Gavin Ross told Ms Torrens that the woman admitted leaving the baby with the bouncer because she thought the father was on his way out to care for it and she wanted to go drinking. She told gardaí that she had telephoned the father that afternoon and arranged that he would take the child for the evening.
She claimed he said he would be in the Belgard Pub but she was refused entry because she had a child with her. She said the bouncer said the child's father would be out in a minute and she then went to Molly Heffernan's pub by taxi.
Det Garda Ross said it was an understatement to describe the woman as having behaved foolishly and it was this that led to her being in custody for 12 months after she was brought back from England following a European bench warrant being issued for her arrest.
He said that the woman had not had custody of the baby since April 2003 and that she admitted to having a drink problem and to suffering from depression since the birth of the child.