False accusation that changed mother’s young family for ever

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Louise Mason is finally a mother again, leading a family life for the first time in more than five years. She presents a calm — if brittle — front as she talks of her ordeal since she was falsely accused of harming her baby and having her children disappear into the care system one by one. The long battle to clear her name and have her children returned to her has left this 38-year-old single mother utterly drained and emotionless. She pauses before answering questions, chooses her responses with caution, and, even as she insists that she is happy, can barely raise a smile. Shadowing her happiness is the knowledge that, despite being cleared of all claims, she may never have her middle child — taken from her at four weeks — returned. He has bonded so well with his foster family that she may lose him permanently into enforced adoption. Ms Mason’s agony began when her four-week-old baby was taken ill one Saturday afternoon. “She made a strange cry and was very pale, very cold,” she told The Times in the office of her solicitor, Carmel McGilloway. Her GP instantly alerted Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry. “It was touch and go that night, the baby was bleeding internally and had to be given a transfusion. A lady in the hospital gave me a picture of St Teresa and said, ‘She never fails you’.” Ms Mason, a devout Roman Catholic, began praying. Her baby was transferred to the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, 60 miles (97 km) away, with a preliminary diagnosis of neuroblastoma, an abdominal tumour most commonly found in infants.