Faced with shootings and crime in parts of Limerick, families are moving out - if they can, reports Kathy Sheridan from Southill
In Southill, where five-year-old Jordan Crawford was shot in the leg with a machine gun last Sunday night, residents are voting with their feet. The only politician who lives there, Labour councillor James Houlihan, can name six families who have moved out of O'Malley Park and Keys Park - two of Southill's four estates - in the past few weeks, because of what he calls "anti-social behaviour".
"And they're the only ones known to me. There are probably more," Houlihan says.
Families do not move on a whim. For some it means the loss of their only asset. Often the only alternative is expensive rented accommodation. "A couple of them were tenant-purchasers and they just handed back their homes, so they're losing money because there's no sell-on value here."
Houses in good condition in O'Malley Park have been advertised for as little as €25,000. This is not surprising to anyone confronted with the tense, intimidating wasteland that comprises much of O'Malley Park (named after the late Donough O'Malley, the Limerick-born Minister who introduced free secondary education).
Entire rows of houses have been abandoned. Most of them have been burnt out - a particular characteristic of this estate - but many that seem derelict are inhabited by families living behind broken windows and boarded-up front doors. A young woman, pregnant and tearful, points to the bottom of the estate where, she says, elderly people live behind steel shutters. "They're so frightened, they keep them shutters down day and night, so they're all their lives in the dark."
Another woman in her early 50s, who looks 15 years older and has de facto responsibility for several grandchildren, describes how gunmen smashed their way into her own and neighbouring houses in recent weeks, roaming through the rooms, ignoring the cowering residents as they searched for the brother of a neighbour. The neighbour - a vulnerable single woman who lives alone - was beaten, burnt out of her house and barely escaped with her life. Her kitchen appliances and possessions lie in a front garden, destroyed by fire and rain. It's hardly surprising to find that a quarter of Southill's population has moved out in six years.
Women taking their children home from school all say that they would move out if they could but, in the meantime, feel that no one is speaking out for them, "no one who really understands what it's like to live in here".
Houlihan notes that community spirit has "suffered hugely" in recent years. Unlike Moyross, where an umbrella group of community leaders articulated local revulsion after the arson attack on the Gavin children, their Southill counterparts went to ground this week.
One suggests that this is because they have been "stung" before by journalists seeking only negative stories. Mostly, however, it is because they are "afraid to raise their heads above the parapet". The fear is palpable at every level.
Even Houlihan, who lives in Keys Park, the oldest part of Southill, prefers to dwell on "design" flaws in the estate and "anti-social behaviour" - which has seen to it that the city bus service stops at 6pm - as being the major challenge, rather than adolescent hitmen, brutal intimidation and hard drugs.
Michael Murray, the State Solicitor for Limerick, is appalled by what he calls the "abandonment" of O'Malley Park by the local authority.
"My understanding is that they decided that it needed to be redeveloped, but instead of implementing the plan, they abandoned O'Malley Park. Rather than demolish it and have an orderly reconstruction, they left it to the criminal gangs to take it over and demolish it themselves. Most of the people who remain are captive there. It's a wasteland and they have no way out."
Meanwhile, Olivia Crawford, the mother of the five-year-old injured child, was pointing out that this was the third shooting her nine-year-old son, Dylan, had witnessed in four months. Last July, he was with his uncle, Paul Crawford - who admits he was the intended target last Sunday - when a gunman fired at the van they were in. A 15-year-old boy caught in the crossfire sustained two leg injuries. Dylan was also present when his grandmother's home was peppered with 17 machine-gun rounds last Thursday week. He was there again when his younger brother was shot on Sunday. His grandfather said that Dylan "ran away in shock", and is now "out in the country" with another daughter.
The complexity of Limerick's so-called "feuds" is evident in the murderous series of events conducted between gangs with strongholds in St Mary's Park and Southill. Two successive attacks on a house in Moyross, believed to be occupied by associates of the Dundon-McCarthy gang, are thought to be linked to the shootings in Southill.
The four occupants of a car believed to have been involved in two attempted shootings, one in Carew Park in Southill and another in Childers Road, are reported to have included a 15-year-old boy. Paul Crawford has said that a gun was pointed at his head last Friday week in Carew Park but that it jammed, making a total of three apparent attempts on his life last weekend. He admits that there is "a hit on [ his] head", although none of his family appears to understand why he is being targeted.
"Limerick is too small. I wish to God I knew what they were fighting over," his mother Mary says.
THIS WEEK, SHOOTING incidents on Limerick's southside, including Southill, were revealed to be up 145 per cent on the same period last year. Amid numerous reports of reckless gun attacks around the city in recent weeks, the Limerick Independent reported that a man wearing a balaclava, and believed to be carrying a gun, strode into the casualty department of the Regional Hospital in Dooradoyle on October 24th and "had a good look around for someone in particular" before leaving.
In Limerick on Tuesday, a court was told that a 16-year-old schoolboy was found carrying a Beretta double-barrel shotgun and ammunition on a city commuter bus on Sunday afternoon.
Michael Murray, who remarks that feuds have been part of Limerick life for as long as he has been in practice, says, "Part of the problem with feuding is that there are plenty of young recruits now, very often from families who have no previous connection with crime. It's partly that they're impressed that those behaving in the most atrocious manner seem to get the most out of life but also - and this is the most dangerous part - by the fact that they see them getting away with blue murder".
When incidents erupt in parts of Limerick, the usual official response is that only a tiny percentage of bad apples are involved.
"It's a small number of families in terms of the main players," agrees Murray, "but the actual circle of that family is quite wide. The guards have said from time to time that there are no more than 100 involved. In my view 100 is a very significant number of people, when every day they are alienating many more people from their own area and from society."
While the Garda has had noticeable success with arrests and arms seizures in Limerick, and Murray describes the gardaí in Limerick as "particularly good . . . and remarkably brave, with absolutely fantastic successes", he compares the situation to a "wet sponge . . . Every time you squeeze it dry, someone kicks it back into the bucket again." And gardaí have been targeted. A young Moyross man, Shane Shapland, was convicted of firing shots at a uniformed garda.
Murray describes an ageing friend, a man who has lived on the famous Island all his life, who has "withdrawn from society in his own area. That's because he doesn't want to have to engage with criminal types but can't afford not to be friendly towards them if he meets them. For him, it's not about fear. It's just complete anathema to him to associate with people like that."
Cllr Diarmuid Scully points out that while Limerick crime figures "would have to triple to reach those of Dublin North and South-Central garda districts, the trends are very worrying. In Dublin, the crime rate is coming down but in Limerick Garda Division, the rate has almost doubled in five years. The reason for that and the jump in other regional cities - but not in Dublin - is that hard drugs have begun to come in. My fear is that it could get out of control."
Murray also notes that there has been "a seismic shift in the drugs trade in Limerick, especially in the last 12 months when heroin has become very significant. Privately the guards say that a lot of problems are coming down the line, and even among those involved in the feuds who are becoming users themselves."
HE HAS A few novel proposals, beginning with a policy of "intelligent zero tolerance" (involving properly resourced community gardaí with a "back-up unit" to deal with recalcitrant youths) and another to deal with on-going intimidation of witnesses, and with witnesses who refuse to give any kind of statement to gardaí where a serious crime had been committed.
The remedy, he believes, would involve the appointment of "an investigative judicial person who would be given powers to compel people to give evidence and, if they refuse, could commit them to prison".
Meanwhile, however, the debate about Garda resources, numbers on the ground and visible deterrents continues. Murray believes that policing in Ireland is "a fire brigade system . . . I'm convinced that the police force - in terms of uniformed officers on the ground - is at much the same level as it was back in the 1950s, with a much smaller population. We will continue to have a growing criminal problem until that is addressed." His figures show that the proportion of gardaí per 100,000 of the population rose from 234 in 1951 to just 241 in 2002.
According to Fine Gael, the number of officers in the Garda Southern Region increased by only one to 1,868 in 2005, the last year for which figures are available. Although this week's debate focused on Southill, a different planet for many Limerick people, Bertie Ahern remarked that there was a large number of gardaí on duty in the Moyross area.
A short meeting last Tuesday between Garda Supt Gerry Mahon, a city housing officer and local councillors, originally called by Cllr Houlihan to discuss the torching of a house in the few hours between the departure of one tenant and the arrival of a new one, "escalated to a full meeting" and an urgent discussion about security and policing after the shooting of Jordan Crawford.
The result was a promise of plain-clothes officers, an armed unit, a dog unit, foot patrols and additional squad cars, according to Fine Gael councillor, Diarmuid Scully.
That afternoon, a group of residents who said that "there'd usually be time for you to be hung, drawn and quartered before the guards would pay any attention", were startled to see O'Malley Park suddenly inundated with high visibility gardaí on foot, plain clothes detectives and Garda vans.
"They're hoping to have escalating patrols for a few weeks," says Cllr Houlihan. Just a few weeks? "They don't have the resources. That's easy to see . . ."
Meanwhile, they wait to see if the brief of the task force leader, John Fitzgerald to address social exclusion, crime and disorder issues in Moyross, will include Southill too.
"We've asked the question," says Houlihan, "we still don't know the answer. Maybe it's just another smokescreen."