Woken by the shots, then 'all I heard was run, run, get down'

Joanne Russell woke at 8am yesterday to the sound of a helicopter, shouting and gunshots

Joanne Russell woke at 8am yesterday to the sound of a helicopter, shouting and gunshots. Her apartment is over the Village Store which houses Lusk's post office.

Raiders were trying to rob the post office and gardaí had surrounded the two-storey building. When she looked out her back window, she saw armed gardaí on the flat roof.

"All I heard was just 'run, run, get down'. It just happened all so quick," she said yesterday.

Her daughter Shannon (3) was still asleep but the whirring helicopter finally woke her. "My main priority was the baby and whether we were going to be all right."

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She heard "three or four shots, they were very rapid". After a few moments, she went down to the front door to see if she could leave the apartment.

"They told me to get back in because they [ the raiders] weren't actually gone yet. They were trying to get them into the ambulance so I ran back upstairs to my daughter."

She was finally allowed to leave at about 9.45am.

Up the street, Rose Skelly ran out the front door in her dressing gown when she heard the shouting. "Around eight o'clock I just heard them on the speakers 'we have you covered, we have you covered'.

"I didn't really see a whole lot. I just seen the guards getting out of a camper van and they were all over the place then."

She saw the ambulance arriving and a man being carried out on a stretcher. "A fella came out then with a balaclava."

Rose works at the deli counter of the Village Store and would normally have been on duty but she was nursing a broken wrist. "I surely was glad I was off work," she said.

Her colleague Colette Taylor was also relieved she had not been in the shop. She said it was normally quite busy at that time of the morning. "It would be busy enough now with a few lads coming in and out for breakfast rolls, kids going to secondary school."

Construction worker Paul Harmon had just pulled up outside the Village Store when the drama unfolded.

"The police arrived and one of the police cars pulled a hand-braker in front of us and the police jumped out with all the guns. There was a police car running up and one of the policemen was hanging out the window with a gun," he said. "We had a policeman coming over to us asking us to get back."

However, they couldn't reverse as a car was blocking their way. "We were kept there for about, say, 15 minutes before we could reverse back and get out of there."

Up the road, a local woman said she was afraid to take a short cut through the graveyard in case one of the raiders was lurking there. "I hear a few of them got away," she said. "You'd never know where they might be hiding." However, at that stage, the other three members of the gang were in custody in local Garda stations.