The report of the inquiry into the removal of two Roma children from their families in Dublin and Athlone last year has been published by the Minister for Justice.

It finds that the Gardai should have carried out more extensive and discrete inquiries before they called on the homes of the children and removed them.

The children - a seven-year-old girl in Tallaght and a two-year-old boy in Athlone - were removed from the care of their families last October after members of the public expressed concern that they were not actually related to the people they were living with.

This followed a case in Greece in which a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl was found not to be biologically related to a Roma couple who had raised her. Concerns were raised about possible child trafficking, however, a Bulgarian woman later came forward and admitted that she was the child's mother and had willingly left her in the care of the Greek couple.

The report, which was carried out by the Ombudsman for Children, Emily Logan, found that physical dissimilarities between parents and their children do not constitute a reasonable basis for suspecting that those children have been abducted.

The Gardai involved believed they were acting in the best interests of the children and no evidence of ‘ethnic profiling' at an organisational level was found. However, the report also noted that the the Gardai failed to properly evaluate the information provided to them about the families in question, and the fact that the people involved were members of the Roma community played a part in the decision-making process.

It also stated that the use of DNA to establish who a child's parents are represents a disproportionate interference in the private lives of those involved, where there is a large amount of alternative information that could attest to the relationship between a child and their parents.

Both the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, and the Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, apologised to the families involved.

"We are sorry. We regret the pain they went through. It should not have happened. It just should not. It happened out of a determination to protect children, but that determination got skewed. The best of intentions played out in a distressing manner affecting two children and two families, as highlighted in the report," Minister Fitzgerald said.

The report by Emily Logan is available here