AN urgent warning about bogus health care workers has been issued by gardai and the Southern Health Board after a second incident in Cork involving two women in their 30s.
Gardai said they were mystified by the incident which occurred yesterday in Blarney just 24 hours after a man and woman, posing as health board employees, tried to gain entry to a house a few miles away at Berrings. The women involved in the two incidents did not appear to resemble each other.
A teenager was minding an infant in a house outside Blarney village when she noticed a woman outside at about 10.30 a.m. yesterday. When she opened the door, the woman, who was well dressed in a dark suit, said she was a health visitor.
When the babysitter asked for identification, the woman looked at another woman standing some distance away, at the gate to the house, and then walked away without saying anything else.
An investigating garda said: "We were on the scene in less than 10 minutes but there was no sign of the women. We do not know what they were doing.
On Thursday a man in his 40s and a woman in her mid 30s called to a house in Berrings, near Mallow, and tried to take a 17 month old baby girl from her mother's arms. They told the mother, Mrs Gisela Flynn, they were working for the health board, and were taking the child following complaints of physical abuse.
The woman tried unsuccessfully to grab the child, Lorna, from her mother when she went to telephone a neighbour, and the man also pulled at her arm.
Mrs Flynn said yesterday she ran to a bedroom and barricaded the door before climbing out a window and running across a field to a neighbour.
An SHB representative said anybody claiming to be employed by the board should be asked for identification, and if necessary the door should be shut on them and their identity checked with the board.
"We are taking this very seriously, and nobody will be offended by being asked for identification or having it checked," the representative added.