Three years to the day before Lindsay Clancy killed her three children and tried to kill herself, another nurse slaughtered her own three kids in an eerily similar case in Ireland. 

Diedre Morley, a 44-year-old pediatric nurse in Dublin, smothered her three children to death with duct tape and plastic bags and then unsuccessfully tried to kill herself on Jan. 24, 2020.

That same day in 2023, Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, strangled her three children before swallowing pills, cutting her wrists and neck, and jumping from a second-story window of her Massachusetts home in a failed suicide.

Morley was suffering from bipolar disorder, according to a psychiatrist who testified for the defense at her 2021 trial — a diagnosis Clancy, 36, also at one point received.

“A lot of people online are comparing the two cases and people have made comments about Deirdre, the kids and me,” Morley’s estranged husband, Andrew McGinley, told the Irish Mirror in a recent interview. “They’re often just doing it just to be controversial and get a handful of likes.”

McGinley said he empathized with both Lindsay and Patrick Clancy.

“I empathize with them both in that people are choosing sides. That’s what happened in our case,” he added. “People are speculating and posting lies online. It’s just not right. The facts are the facts.”

Online conspiracists have even made wild leaps to tie Patrick Clancy to the Morley case.

“I can’t get past the similarities, except for the husband. The husband here struggled hardcore with the loss,” one woman on Facebook said of the Irish case. “But is it possible Pat seen this story and tried to recreate it?”

Patrick Clancy’s attorney Howard Cooper has lashed out at the “escalating campaign of misinformation” being waged by unhinged influencers and attention-seeking “minor celebrities,” telling Boston 25 News, “This campaign, now fueled by insatiable media coverage, remains at a fever pitch and has resulted in real-life threats to his reputation, livelihood, and life … Enough is enough — this spread of blatant and baseless falsehoods must stop.”

The outcome of Morley’s case was drastically different than Clancy’s — the Dublin nurse was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a jury of 10 men and two women after four and a half hours of deliberation.

The Irish mother killed her children because she thought she had “irreparably damaged” them and “had to put an end to their suffering.”

“They were broken like me because I couldn’t parent them. I couldn’t be resilient,” she told police. “The feelings intensified that I needed to go.”

Morley had been having thoughts of killing her children for three or four days, she told a psychiatrist. The night before, on Jan. 23, 2020, Morley crushed more than six morphine tablets into the boys’ cereal in an attempt to kill them, but was “relieved” after they spat out the poisoned food.

The next day, however, “something clicked” when she was with her son, Darragh, and looked at the clock midday. “I could do it now … I could smother him now,” Morley told police she had thought before carrying out the unspeakable massacre, the Irish Times reported.

Like Clancy, Morley had two boys and a girl — Conor, 9, Darragh, 7, and Carla, 3 — whose first names even shared the same initials as Clancy’s children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.

Morley put thick brown tape over her 7-year-old’s mouth, a bag over his head and a cushion on top of the bag. After killing him, she said she felt she “couldn’t leave any of them behind” and did the same to her 3-year-old daughter– even holding the little girl’s nose when she realized she was still breathing.

After killing Darragh and Carla, Morley picked up her oldest child from school at lunch and suggested playing a game where they put tape over his mouth to see if he could talk. “Stop, mammy,” her 9-year-old son said as she twisted a plastic bag over his head.

“I’m sorry, Conor,” she said she told her son, noting she didn’t feel she could stop herself.

After killing the children, she packed pills and wine and left home after 4 p.m. with the intention to kill herself before her husband returned from a work trip. But she crashed her car, and someone drove by and took her home.

Morley– who struggled with depression for about a decade by the time of the killings and had spent at least a year trying to get psychiatric help, filed a lawsuit against her health-care provider — like Clancy. The Irish suit is still pending, according to court records reviewed by The Post.

Morley is still at Dublin’s Central Mental Hospital, though she was granted day leave privileges from the facility in early 2025, The Irish Times reported.

Morley’s husband, Andrew McGinley, 58, said there were times when he wanted to “liquidate” everything and move to the Caribbean to work in a “beach bar,” in an Irish podcast last year, but that “I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t try and make changes that could help protect children in the future.”

“As a woman that I loved up until the 24th of January, 2020, I now hate the fact that I have to breathe the
same air as her. That’s not a nice thing to say, but that’s how I’ve been left feeling,” he told the Irish Times.

McGinley didn’t return The Post’s request for comment.

The Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office, which tried the Clancy case, didn’t return The Post’s questions whether this could have been a copycat crime — or just a coincidence. Clancy’s internet search history presented at trial didn’t reveal searches for the Morley case.