The toddler admitted to a Dublin hospital suffering from hypothermia after being found abandoned on a busy bypass in the city early last Thursday morning has been placed in foster care.
The 21/2-year-old boy was found at 3.10 a.m., more than six hours after a passer-by made a 999 call, altering garda∅ to the sighting.
The caller reported seeing a drunken man at the Chapelizod bypass with a beer in one hand and an unhappy child in the other.
Garda∅ went to the scene and arrested the man for being drunk and a danger to traffic at 8.30 p.m. He was taken to Kilmainham Garda station, where he remained for several hours, and garda∅ only became aware his son had been with him when the man was collected from the station by his sister.
However, a caller to yesterday's Liveline programme on RT╔ said he rang the garda∅ on Wednesday at 8.05 p.m. to report seeing the man and boy on the motorway as he drove by. Paul from New Zealand said he told the garda∅ there was " something not right" about what he saw. "That's why we called, because there was a toddler. It looked like he was crying or he was upset and the man was trying to pull the kid and the kid wasn't happy basically," he said.
Of the Garda response, he said: "They were really slack about it, I thought. They didn't ask me who I was, or anything about who the man was or anything about the situation. They just said OK we'll send a car out."
The Garda press office last evening confirmed it received a call in relation to the incident at 8.05 p.m. However, spokesman Supt John Farrelly said he could not comment on the operation. "Apart from the arrest made there is an inquiry into what happened afterwards and so I cannot comment on the stages of the inquiry," he said.
Meanwhile, the child, who was brought to Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin to be treated for hypothermia after he was discovered by a sniffer dog shivering in undergrowth, has been placed in foster care by the East Coast Area Health Board.
A spokesman for the health board said the child would be in foster care for the foreseeable future. "Our social workers are continuing to work to secure the most appropriate and best care for the child," he said.