February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — Beverly Cooper-Flynn, a Mayo TD, has suffered her third mugging in Dublin when her handbag was snatched while she was sitting at an outside table at a restaurant close to the Dail with a Fianna Fail colleague.
The thief struck last week when Cooper-Flynn and Donegal TD Cecilia Keaveney were taking a break from Dail business at South Anne Street eatery. He snatched Cooper-Flynn’s handbag and mobile phone from a seat at the table and fled.
The TD and a man at another table gave chase and forced the thief to drop the handbag when he mounted his getaway bike just around the corner.
She rang her phone and the new owner answered it from O’Connell Street.
" ‘You’re a culchie,’ he told me and I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ I said where are you from yourself and he said he was a Dub," Cooper-Flynn said.
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The TD was amazed the thief kept asking what he had missed in the handbag — in fact it was £100 and a check for an unspecified amount, a birthday present from her father Padraig, a former EU commisioner.
He offered to sell her her phone for £50 and said he would ring back but the TD decided to play safe and had it cut off.
"It was unbelievable — in broad daylight," Cooper-Flynn said.
The TD was previously mugged by a drug addict in a bar in trendy Temple Bar. She walked up and down for half an hour and spotted the thief going into another bar. She retrieved her wallet — less her cash — and the girl involved was caught.
When she was a student in Dublin she also had her bag taken in a café in the ILAC Centre.