The four women who died in Leixlip on Wednesday did not want attention when they were alive and should be granted this in death, one elderly man said yesterday.
He had lived beside the women for almost 15 years at a previous address in Sandymount, Dublin.
"They were so much to themselves, God love them. They thought it bad to open the door to anyone. But they were always very respectful to me, and it's really very sad."
The former home of the three Mulrooney sisters and their aunt, at 86 Tritonville Road, Sandy mount, is an impressive house on an expensive residential road.
But the house occupied by Frances (83), Josephine (46) and twins Catherine and Ruth (51) was in poor order during their tenure.
After they left, almost two years ago, "the skips moved in overnight", according to one local.
A man in his 30s answered the door of the house yesterday. He said he had rented the house on Tritonville Road with his wife since March and confirmed the owner had completed a "major structural overhaul" on the house but that the decorating was not yet completed.
"I had heard the previous occupants were a bit eccentric, but I never knew them. I heard it on the news last night, but I never made the connection," he said.
The women moved from Dublin to Leixlip almost two years ago where the South Western Area Health Board provided them with rent supplements for a house in Rinawade Grove.
It was in this modern house close to the "Cyber Plains" location of high-tech computer plants that the discovery of the women's decaying bodies was made on Wednesday.
The owner of Sandymount Hardware Ltd, Mr David Ryan, said he first encountered the women in the early 1970s when he worked in a hardware cash-and-carry store on the north side of the city.
He recognised the women when they began visiting the shop he opened in 1986 and they eventually became regular customers, picking up small items for the upkeep of the house and garden like paint and shrubs.
Originally from the Dolphin's Barn area of the South Circular Road, the Mulrooney family owned a hardware shop called Feeney's.
It is understood there are two surviving sisters. Their mother died 12 years ago.
Gardai at the local Irishtown station believe they dealt only once with the sisters over recent years.
Three years ago the women complained that a car was frequently parked outside their home and that they were being watched.
"It was a case of reassuring them more than anything else," said the garda who dealt with the complaint and who spoke to Catherine and Josephine at their front door. He aided the investigation into the deaths by identifying the two women in Tallaght Hospital.
The nervousness felt by the women appears to have increased on their move to Leixlip, and the women retreated further into their reclusive existence.
A detective yesterday confirmed that they were now satisfied the blocking of the front and back doors with the fridge and a table was simply a crude security measure.
"This kind of behaviour may be alien to you or me, but to them it was quite normal," he said.