Snatched: The shocking tale of three babies taken from the streets of Dublin

She left the Whitewell Estate in north Belfast, made her way to the city centre and caught the morning train to Dublin. She was originally Barbara McEvoy, from Green Lane in Carlow town, and her parents died when she was young. Her childhood was described as “disturbed”.

She and Ernest (51), a labourer with Belfast Corporation, were married in August 1939, and she had a history of miscarriages after her son was born. They had moved to Whitewell, an estate of white boxy houses known locally as White City, three years before.

Back then, before contraception was widely available, Ireland was a country of big families. There was a stigma attached to having a child “out of wedlock”, as it was called, but there was a less publicised but powerful stigma attached to a woman who was “barren”, a biblical term that was still in use.

Because of her small family, Mrs McGeehan felt slighted by neighbours, and that was part of her mission in travelling to Dublin that December morning 70 years ago last week.

That same morning, Theresa Berrigan (21) waved off her husband Matt­hew (21), who was a railway porter at Westland Row Station. A street photographer then called to their flat at 44 Moore Street to take the first photos of her three-month-old son, Patrick.

At about 2pm she put the baby into a wine-coloured pram and wheeled him into Henry Street. She spied a cute little teddy bear in a display at Reids Toy Shop and thought it would make a lovely Christmas present.

As the brake on the pram was brok­en, she parked it carefully by the window and nipped into the shop “for two minutes”. In those two minutes the worlds of Barbara McGeehan and Theresa Berrigan would collide. Neith­er was ever the same again.

​Barbara McGeehan was by now in Dublin and walking down Henry Street when her watchful eye caught sight of Theresa Berrigan disappearing through the shop door. She did not hesitate. Within seconds she took the handle of the pram and strolled on, pushing it towards Mary Street. Reids shop was thronged and, failing to catch the eye of an assistant, Theresa Berrigan left without the teddy.

But back on the street her pram was gone. What flashed through her mind was the disappearance of baby Pauline Ashmore three months earlier from outside a shop in Camden Street in identical circumstances. She called for help.

Meanwhile, Barbara McGeehan crossed the Liffey and did not stop until she turned into Crane Street, a quiet cobbled street in the shadow of the Guinness brewery. Seeing nobody about, she took baby Patrick out of the pram and wrapped him in a blanket. As she did so, one bootie and sock fell back into the pram.

She then walked into Thomas Street with the baby in her arms and asked a passerby where she could get a taxi to Amiens Street. He told her there was a phone in Murray’s pub nearby.

At 4pm a local woman, Mrs O’Reilly, found the abandoned pram, but did not realise its significance until she heard about the missing baby on the 6.30pm news.

Matthew Berrigan was also late hearing the news and rushed to his parents’ flat in Townsend Street, where his young wife was being comforted.

Louisa Doherty, originally from Castlebar, Co Mayo, but living on the Crumlin Road in Belfast where her husband ran a pub, had taken her 10-year-old son Danny and her 13-year-old niece Louise to visit her nephew, who was training to be a Christian Brother in St Joseph’s College at Baldoyle in Dublin.

They caught the 6.25pm Dublin- Belfast train at Clontarf station and found seats in a third-class carriage, occupied by a nervous-looking woman with a crying baby. As the baby bawled, Mrs Doherty found it strange that the mother had no bottle to quieten it and that the child was wearing only one sock and one bootie.

When they got to Belfast at 10.40pm, the woman told Mrs Doher­ty she was living in the White City and she would walk as far as King Street to catch a bus home.

The following morning, when she saw the front page of the Sunday Independent, Mrs Doherty realised immediately that the woman and baby on the train had the country in a frenzy.

Beaming from the front page, under the heading “Baby Kidnapped: Another Dublin Sensation”, was the street photographer’s picture of the child who was known as Baby Berrigan. Mrs Doherty’s niece, Louise, immediately pointed to the front page, saying: “That’s the baby.”

In the White City on December 19, an RUC constable making discreet inquiries was told a neighbour heard a baby crying the previous night in 32 Garton Way. He duly reported back, and a squad of 50 policemen descended on the three-bedroomed terraced house. They found baby Patrick Berrigan asleep downstairs in a cot.

I told my husband they were keeping the baby in hospital to build up its strength. I did not want to tell him it was stillborn

“This is a terrible thing I have done,” Barbara McGeehan admitted instantly. “About six or seven weeks ago, I gave birth to a stillborn baby… About a fortnight later, I returned home. I told my husband that they were keeping the baby in hospital to build up its strength. I did not want to tell him it was stillborn as he would have been disappointed.”

But when detectives from Belfast and Dublin spoke to her gynaecologist, he told them she could not have given birth as he had carried out a hysterectomy the previous year. They also became suspicious about the age gap between her two children.

Barbara McGeehan claimed that when she was living in Lonsdale Street, her neighbours were a couple of street singers, Patrick McDonagh and his girlfriend, Ellen, from Dublin. When Ellen became unexpectedly pregnant, she gave the newborn baby to Mrs McGeehan, who named her Bernadette.

Detectives were unimpressed. The events had put them in mind of another missing child from Dublin, Elizabeth Browne.

Her parents, John and Bridget Browne, who had four other children, lived in Corporation Street and sold newspapers from a pitch outside the arcade on Henry Street, just yards from where Patrick Berrigan was snatched.

Elizabeth Browne, who was born on August 12, 1950, was just three months old when she disappeared on November 25 that year. Her age matched that of Bernie McGeehan.

As the Berrigans were reunited with their baby Patrick on Thursday, December 23, 1954, detectives were told by the Brownes, now living in Blackditch Road, Ballyfermot, that their daughter had a specific birthmark on her ear.

It was soon confirmed that Bernie McGeehan had the same birthmark. She was Elizabeth Browne.

She is everything I have got. When the police told me she was not my child, my world collapsed

With his wife on remand in prison, a distraught Ernest McGeehan, clutch­ing Bernie’s teddy bear, told reporters: “She is everything I have got. When the police told me she was not my child, my world collapsed.”

Ernest McGeehan said he received a telegram from a nursing home in 1950, saying his wife had given birth and mother and child were doing well.

It was probably sent by his wife, who was staying at a Legion of Mary Hostel in Brunswick Street, Dublin. She left on November 23, kidnapping Elizabeth Browne along the way before travelling home to Belfast.

Elizabeth was finally returned to her real parents after a hearing in the High Court in Belfast on February 7, 1955. Mr McGeehan also turned up and newspapers reported heartbreaking descriptions of the child crying as she was driven away.

Lizzy Welshman, who also lived in Garton Way, told the writer Marianne Elliott for her book Hearthlands: A Memoir Of the White City housing estate in Belfast: “If she hadn’t gone back to Dublin for that second baby, no one would ever have known.”

​Barbara McGeehan was sentenced to two years in prison for taking Patrick Berrigan, but was given parole at Christmas 1955 and released the following February.

Elizabeth Browne, who became a newspaper seller like her parents, went on to have three children of her own, but died of cancer at the young age of 38.

There was one piece of the “missing baby” jigsaw left — the disappearance of baby Pauline Ashmore just weeks before Patrick Berrigan was taken.

Born to Christy and Margaret Ashmore, from Cashel Avenue in Crumlin, Dublin, on March 6, 1954, the infant had been snatched from outside a shop on Lower Camden Street on October 19 that year.

Just when all the publicity about missing babies seemed exhausted, journalist Jack Smyth picked up the telephone on the newsdesk of the Evening Press in Burgh Quay at 10.30am on January 25, 1955.

The caller told him about a “minor miracle” in the Oliver Bond flats, where a woman who had given birth to a baby three months previously was back in the Coombe giving birth to another child.

The caller would not give his name, but when asked when the first baby was born, he answered October 19, the date baby Pauline disappeared.

Reporter Jim Flanagan and photo­grapher Harry Stevens were sent to the flats, where they found a baby matching the Ashmore child in a flat belonging to a Mrs Hughes. She told them she was minding the baby for her daughter, a Mrs Fitzpatrick, who was in hospital.

Flanagan rang Detective John Deering, and they went back to the flats, armed with information from the Ashmores about a distinctive mark on their baby’s left eyelid. The authorities were more understanding than might be expected and the matter was quietly dropped as the Ashmores were reunited with Pauline.

I get the occasional phone call asking if I am ‘that’ Patrick Berrigan. But I had a normal life

​Patrick Berrigan grew up in Ballyfermot and moved to Lucan after he married his wife, Clare. They have two daughters — Nicola, who works in St John of God, Celbridge, and Sinéad, who has a hair salon in the same town. He became a printer and worked in various jobs until his retirement.

“No, it didn’t really affect my life,” Patrick told me. “I suppose people like yourself have always been interested in the story, and I get the occasional phone call asking if I am that Patrick Berrigan. But I had a normal life.”

He has recalled that his mother was fearful about his safety for years afterwards, and he was cautious about his own two daughters when they were growing up.

Patrick had a seizure at his home last March and spent seven weeks in the intensive care unit of Blanchardstown Hospital and 17 weeks in recovery, but is now back home and looking forward to Christmas and full of praise for the care he got in Connolly Hospital.

For Barbara and Ernest McGeehan there was some consolation. They visited their ‘Bernie’ (Elizabeth Browne) in Ballyfermot in 1956, and she and her siblings went on holidays to the White City a year or two later and she stayed on for three months.

On Wednesday, January 26, 1955, the mothers of the three missing babies met for an emotional first time in Dublin. The missing baby saga went into the folklore of a changing city.