FROM her first floor flat in the Mountain View Court complex in Summerhill, north Dublin, Theresa Ryan hears the drug addicts scoring their deals every morning from a dealer on the ground floor.
The small packages of heroin are handed out through a set of yellow railings at the rear balcony of the dealer's flat. At night she hears the users "shooting up" on the steps of the complex. Each day, she passes their discarded syringes and puddles of vomit.
After gardai arrested three alleged drug dealers in the 100 flat complex on Wednesday night, the residents' anger and frustration with drug pushers, which has been simmering for the past few years, was vented.
A crowd of around 250 residents of all ages gathered to cheer the members of Store Street drug unit who arrived to search the homes of four alleged dealers at around 9.30 p.m. The residents taunted the alleged drug dealers and local youths daubed the front of their flats with red paint reading: "Scumbags get out".
According to residents, youths threw stones and bottles at an alleged dealer's car parked outside his flat and ignited it with petrol bombs.
Angry residents yesterday accused the gardai of "heavy handedness" in their treatment of the situation which followed the arrests. They claim they were batoned off the road into their homes and flats by gardai in riot gear. The Garda has strongly denied such claims and said that the steps taken were necessary to restore order.
A woman from Mountain View Court who is four months pregnant, Ms Marie Jackson (31), was brought by ambulance to the Rotunda Hospital complaining of injuries to her head, back and arms. She claimed she was beaten and knocked to the ground by a garda on the top floor balcony of the flats and told to go indoors.
Ms Jackson, who is due to released from hospital today, said tests showed her unborn child was not injured. "It was terrible. They didn't have to pick on me. Let them get the junkies out and leave us alone," she said.
Her partner, Mr Paddy Walsh, also claimed he was struck by a baton. He has made a formal complaint to the gardai.
A 12 year old girl, Samantha McCann, has a bruise on her right shoulder where, she says, a garda hit her with a baton while she was skating to her home at around 11 p.m.
Residents who gathered outside the flats yesterday said the gardai were not tackling the area's drug problem, which, they said, had reached "epidemic" proportions.
Ms Liz Riches, the secretary of the Inner City Organisations Network (ICON), which organised a protest meeting last night in Summerhill, said the drug problem in the area has grown in the past three years.
The Eastern Health Board's city clinic on Amiens Street, the only treatment centre in the area, was treating 150 drug users, with a waiting list of 225, she said.
Ms Riches called for an expansion of drug treatment services to deal with the growing numbers of drug abusers. She said treatment needed to be tailored to the needs of the new generation of young abusers.
Ms Riches said local people wanted more uniformed police to "disrupt" the local drug market. She said allegations of vigilantes in the area were untrue.
"There has been a bubbling of anger in the community because of the lack of uniformed police dealing with the drug problem, but that has not led to vigilantism and that's something which ICON would discourage," she said.