Carl O'Brien reflects on an elaborate hoax which left gardai more sad than angry, but saw the people of Ballymun rally to their side.
After just 2½ hours sleep in the last 48 hours, Insp Karl Heller breathed a sigh of frustration last night as he realised the search for a missing child had been an elaborate hoax.
"I'm sad more than angry right now," he said. "We had 40 gardaí involved for the last 67 hours in the search, a lot of whom weren't surviving on much sleep."
It is estimated that the entire search operation, which involved the Garda helicopter, sniffer dogs, plain-clothed detectives and dozens of Dublin City Council officials, cost tens of thousands of euro.
The frustration is most acute among the dozens of gardaí who spent almost three days on a fruitless search for the mother, with some officers surviving on just a few hours sleep each night.
But there is also the unsettling feeling that gardaí, the local authorities and media had been led astray by pranksters.
The story was heart-rending and shocking, and dominated the media for two days. There was a race against time to save the life of a baby. There appeared to be a young mother in anguish, too crippled by grief to say where she had abandoned her child.
For the media, it was the perfect story. For the Garda, whose credibility has been dented from numerous scandals, it was a chance to demonstrate its public service values.
Gardaí arranged a photo-shoot outside a derelict four-storey block of flats in Sandyhill, Balllymun, at 10.30 a.m. yesterday.
TV cameras and photographers could film and photograph the officers in action, forcing their way into the abandoned flats complex.
Gardaí and council officials, were filmed as they shone their torches, inspecting vacated rooms for the benefit of the media.
One TV crew, in its effort to get a good view from one of the derelict apartments, managed to get locked into the complex by accident.
From early on, some members of the public suspected it was a hoax. So too did some journalists and gardaí.
Maybe it all didn't add up, they said. Maybe, just maybe, everyone was being taken for a ride. In many ways, the story was too good.
Gardaí were last night trying to take something positive out of the experience. "Whatever about what happened with the hoax, we did at least make a connection with the people," said one officer. "I couldn't get over the offers of help pouring in, and the response on the doorsteps was incredible. I'd never seen anything like it."