It’s not how I had imagined my child’s f irst pair of shoes. It felt like I was buying drugs.

Mother tells of her clandestine street-corner encounter

‘She reminds me of the French Resistance ’

THE woman was nervous as she approached the rendezvous point in her local town in the southeast.

She had already paid for the goods over the phone but her supplier had told her not to attract attention.

She would pass a package to her quickly and would not engage in conversation.

The gardaí had been patrolling the town and the supplier felt she was being watched after meeting several customers at the same street corner in recent weeks.

When it came, the handover went smoothly and it wasn’t until the woman got home that the stress of the situation spilled out.

‘It just wasn’t how I imagined buying my baby’s first shoes would be,’ she told the Irish Mail on Sunday. ‘I don’t want to overstate the situation but I was actually very, very emotional.

‘I thought it would be a happy experience, him getting measured and me choosing the nicest pair. Instead, it felt like I was buying drugs, like I was doing something wrong.

‘I’m not actually joking when I say I don’t want to give my name, my son’s name or the name of the town where I live in case this woman gets into trouble.

‘I know she’s helped a number of people in the town in recent weeks. Like one old man who had one pair of shoes that developed a big hole.

‘She reminds me of a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War.’

As almost every parent in Ireland with children under 18 will know, it is forbidden by law to buy children’s shoes or clothes over the counter in Ireland at present.

Unlike buying other items online, buying children’s shoes online is difficult as children should be measured for each pair of shoes they wear.

Not to do so can damage their feet, sometimes for life, according to podiatrists.

In a letter in a national newspaper this week, one mother highlighted the problem.

‘It is just wrong that children’s shoe shops are not listed as essential retail under current Covid restrictions.

‘Young feet can grow up to two sizes over a year and shopping online is not an adequate or even a safe solution.

‘Young children have soft, pliable cartilage in their feet and badly fitted shoes can lead to long-term problems. Does the Cabinet sub-committee not realise that a government has previously fallen over children’s shoes?’

During the last lockdown, Junior Minister Damien English infamously told RTÉ’s Prime Time programme that clothes are ‘not essential’ purchases during Level 5 restrictions.

His comments have led to a number of opposition politicians calling on the Government to address the concerns. But so far, in Lockdown 3, it hasn’t.

A request for comment from the Minister for Children this week went unanswered.

Essential retailers – supermarkets, off-licences, hardware shops, and pharmacies – are permitted to keep their doors open to customers during Level 5 restrictions. But non-essential retailers – homeware shops, clothes shops, toy shops and the like – are only allowed to remain open if they offer online delivery.

Some children have been needing shoes since the end of December and with no end to the lockdown in sight, they will be wearing wellingtons and hand-me-down shoes until after Easter. One parent posted on the Covid Women’s Voices forum that she had been waiting for four weeks for a delivery of shoes for her three sons. Another said that buying shoes online for children was like ‘a lucky dip’ and she’s had to return shoes three times as they didn’t fit.

The woman we spoke to this week said she had sent away for a measuring device from Littlewoods Ireland but she found it difficult to use.

‘In the end, I was in my local town one day and I saw the woman who runs the shoe shop and I jumped on her and asked her to help. She told me how to do the measuring and said she would change the shoes if they weren’t right. I’m glad she did because the six I was going for would have been much too small.

‘But she also said, he’ll have grown out of them in four to six weeks.

‘What am I going to do then?’