‘I didn’t even know their names’ - Neighbours’ sadness over brothers’ death

Daniel and William McCarthy were like shadows in their local community. Over the last 30 years , only a handful of their closest neighbours ever had even the most fleeting of contact with them.

An even smaller number knew their names, at least until the early hours of Tuesday.

That was when a garda – alerted by two friends of the brothers – climbed a ladder borrowed from a neighbour and shined a torch into an upstairs bedroom window. He saw at least one body.

Inside the house in the Millrose Estate in Bluebell, the second brother was found dead. It is believed one brother had died several weeks ago and his sibling, who was dependent on him, perished last weekend.

Lorraine McDermott has been their next door neighbour on the terrace for 25 years. “I didn’t even know their full names,” she says. “And I only knew their first names because a census collector told me it a few years back.”

She doesn’t know whether William or Daniel was the eldest.

It was just after midnight when Ms McDermott first became aware there was a problem on her road. “I heard a bit of a commotion outside and I looked outside and I saw the Garda car. You know it’s trouble when you see a Garda car at that time of night.”

She says either a friend of the pair, “or a nephew, I am not sure which”, had come up to the house “two days running” over the weekend.

“They couldn’t get an answer and thought it was very unusual so they called the guards. I thought it was strange that all the windows at the front were open, now that I think about it. The guard didn’t climb in or anything. He just shone the torch and saw the body. The poor fella.”

From the road, the three-bedroom house in west Dublin looks completely normal. It has been painted fairly recently and the windows are in good condition. A 2013 Toyota Auris is parked in the drive.

But from the back, it is a completely different story.

The back garden is badly overgrown with long weeds almost obscuring the dozens of tyres lying there. Rubbish has accumulated in a trailer occasionally used by the older brother. The back bedroom window is partially boarded up with plywood. Metal grills have been bolted on to all the downstairs windows.

“Those windows have been broken for years,” says a neighbour who asked to be identified only by her first name, Rose. “They were broken by kids throwing rocks up from the canal which runs behind the houses. For years there was nothing at all there, no wood or anything. There was just a net curtain blowing in and out, and all these birds coming and going as they pleased. The house must have been in some state inside, it must’ve been in a terrible state.”

Rose has lived in the small estate – more of a road, really – for 30 years. The brothers were there before her. “I think the estate is nearly 40 years old and they might have been here from the start,” she says.

“They kept themselves to themselves all the time. I never saw them in the church or in the shops or the post office. There was a nun, Sr Bernadette was her name, she knew sign language and she’d come and talk to them. And I think they had a sister. But I am not sure.”

She used to see the older of the two brothers leaving in his car in the mornings and coming back in the evenings but she doesn’t know where he was going.

“The other brother, he was more eccentric really. He used to cycle around on a bicycle. Sometimes he’d stop by piles of breeze blocks. He’d put one foot on the blocks and one foot on the ground and he would just stare at the blocks for hours and hours. It was very odd.”

Lorna Curley lives a few doors away from the house where the McCarthys used to live. “They were very quiet men. They just came and went. I am here over 15 years and I am not sure I ever spoke to them. They were so quiet. It’s sad to think of them just lying there for days. Life takes over, doesn’t it?

“Everyone is so busy nowadays. Everyone is busy, busy, busy. It is sad to think of them just lying there.”

The last time Lorraine McDermott saw either of the brothers was in the middle of last week. “I saw the fellow with the bike during the week. He would often be cycling but he wasn’t cycling this time, he was walking. I think that would have been Wednesday or Thursday. I can’t remember exactly.

“The other man, the man with the car, he was lovely. He used to work in the garden, sanding and polishing things. I remember one time he came and knocked on my door to tell me I had left my window open,” she said.

Prayers were said for the brothers at the 9.30am mass at the Our Lady of the Wayside church nearby, but they were only identified by their surname. The priest saying mass, Fr Tom McCabe, admitted he had not been aware of the brothers until Tuesday.

“I had never come across them, no. But I am only standing in here, it is not my parish. It is terrible to think of the man spending all that time alone in the house with his dead brother. He obviously had no idea what to do.”

Tony Combes manages a community development project in the community centre less than a kilometre away from the men's front door. He too was shocked by the news, but perhaps not as surprised as some people.

“We support a lot of older men here,” he said. “I think the wider population probably regards older people as being sorted, with their pensions and their pottering around. But there is a sense of community that is missing.”

He said: “Maybe it is because people are busy and they have their own problems or maybe we are losing the community spirit or maybe people are afraid that they will be accused of interfering in other people’s lives.”

He says the problem is particularly common among older men, men of the McCarthy brothers’ age.

“Women tend to look after each other but a man is a very different social animal. We have events and activities here but once they end the men tend to go their own way. They very seldom knock on each other’s doors.

“Often when men finish work they become socially isolated. When people are on their own it is different because there is no commitment from anyone in the wider community to look after them.”

Back at the McCarthy brothers’ house, a single bouquet of flowers has been left on the footpath. There is no note. What could it have said if no-one knew their names?