Margaret Kelly Ffrench has often wondered how parents of abducted children cope.
"Especially around the time of the Sarah Payne case, I would often spend five minutes thinking: what must those people be going through?"
For 45 minutes on Thursday afternoon, it seemed her worst nightmare had come to pass. Dropping material off at the house of a curtain maker in Santry, Dublin, she turned to find that her car had disappeared, and with it her three small children.
The thief had exploited a brief opportunity, and an uncharacteristic mistake on her part. "I've never left the keys in the ignition before. I don't know what happened to me - it was just a momentary lapse."
Her first, fleeting thought was that the car was parked somewhere else. Then came the panic. "I was frantic. I just lost it completely. I'll never forget the terror as long as I live. All I could think was that whoever had taken them must be off their head - either high on drugs or a paedophile."
Gardaí were called to the house and she made a statement. The patrol car was no sooner gone than it was back again, after a radioed message that two children had been found in nearby Beaumont.
In fact, all three had been abandoned by the driver. But the man who spotted them had at first not seen 15-month-old Brian in his baby seat on the other side of the garden wall.
The possibility that only two of the children had been released left their mother even more distressed, as the patrol car speeded towards Beaumont, siren blaring, through rush-hour traffic.
"They were driving as fast as they could, through red lights and everything, but it seemed to take forever," she said. "I was telling them it's not two children, it's three, and they were trying to calm me down."
The panic ended when they reached the house where the children had been abandoned. All three were there, unharmed, and being comforted by the elderly couple who found them.
At home in Swords yesterday, Cillían, 10 in July, Meaghan, seven next month, and Brian were none the worse for the ordeal, their mother said. "They insisted on sleeping in the room with us last night. But apart from that, they're fine."
The incident happened at about 4.20 p.m. on Thursday, and Margaret noticed nothing unusual when parking the car on busy Lorcan Avenue.
After fetching the curtain material from the boot, she spent "a couple of minutes" on the doorstep, giving measurements and other instructions.
There was no screech of car tyres, or anything else to alert her until the brief conversation ended.
"Then I just turned and looked, and the car was gone."
