'Harmless' man killed during attack, say locals

Neighbours described Paddy Mooney as a nice man who got mixed up with the wrong people

PADDY MOONEY’S ground-floor flat in Pearse House ,where he and a known drug-dealer were shot dead on Sunday night, is just yards from a children’s play area.

Garda cordon tape sealed off the entrance to his flat and to the stairwell of Block G yesterday in the horseshoe-shaped apartment complex just off Pearse Street in Dublin’s south-inner city.

In front of where he was shot is a small enclosed playground with a blue swing and a multi-coloured see-saw. There were children out playing in the slush on Sunday at 6.30pm when four men entered his apartment and shot him and Brendan Molyneaux dead.

Locals say Mr Mooney (58) lived all his life in the same Pearse Street area. His sister Mary lived opposite and his other sister Anne nearby in Leo Fitzgerald House.

He was a familiar figure shuffling to the local Windjammer or Pearse Tavern pubs with one hand in his pocket as a result of an accident which left him paralysed down the left-hand side. “A harmless old bugger,” one resident said. “As long as I’ve known him he was always crippled.”

A neighbour who gave him his dinner every day but who did not want to be named described him as a nice man who “wouldn’t harm a fly”. “I feel terrible to lose a good friend. We’d joke and we’d laugh. He was a lovely person,” she said.

Maria Martin, who lives opposite, said he was a “quiet man who kept to himself, but unfortunately got mixed up with the wrong people”.

A woman who lives in the area said everybody was shocked that such a brutal killing could take place so close to where children played. She had know Mr Molyneux as a drug-dealer who had fallen foul of a gang over a debt.

“What I know about him is not good. He was intimidating a 50-odd-year-old man. He was not going in there [to Mr Mooney’s flat] for dinner or for the tea,” she said.

She described Mr Mooney as “somebody who would go out of his way for anybody. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body. He’d almost do anything for you. He wasn’t a bad person.

“This was a middle-aged man who is after losing his life all because of someone else’s downfall. The man is on a slab all over that bastard [Mr Molyneux],” she added.

Another local said Mr Mooney had started using heroin late in life and Mr Molyneux had used his flat to deal locally. “He was a gentleman. He just fell in with the wrong crowd. He wasn’t on it until last year. He wasn’t on anything. Within a year he was strung out. He [Mr Molyneux] made him pay for the gear while still using his flat,” he said.