Gardaí are following a number of lines of inquiry following a suspected arson attack on a house in Cork city centre on Christmas Day from which four people were said to have had a narrow escape.
The four occupants of the house on Dyke Parade near the Mardyke were upstairs in the three-storey building when an intruder is said to have entered the property around 6.30pm on Christmas Day and poured petrol or some other accelerant on the hallway and ignited it.
The four occupants – the owner, a man in his early 60s, and another man and two women, all in their 40s – managed to get down from an upper floor and were rescued by members of the Cork City Fire Brigade who had responded quickly to the alarm being raised.
Three of those rescued, the man in his 60s and the two women, were taken to the nearby Mercy University Hospital, where they were treated for smoke inhalation and detained overnight for observation as a precautionary measure before being discharged on Tuesday.
Firefighters using breathing apparatus spent over three hours bringing the fire under control, but it’s understood that the blaze caused considerable damage to a downstairs room, the hallway and the stairs leading to the upper floors of the building whose ground floor windows are boarded up.
Gardaí closed off the road at Dyke Parade to allow firefighters employ their aerial ladder platform to dampen down the upper stories of the building to prevent the fire from engulfing the late-18th-century terraced house, one of the oldest in Cork city centre.
A Cork City Fire Brigade spokesperson pointed out that the house is in a terrace of six properties and there had been a real risk of the fire spreading. “Crews worked hard in difficult conditions to prevent the fire from spreading to adjoining properties,” he said.
The scene was preserved overnight and garda technical experts carried out a forensic examination to try to establish the exact seat of the fire and the type of accelerant used to set the ground floor ablaze.
“There’s no doubt that the four people who were in the house at the time had a lucky escape because the hall area and the stairs and a downstairs room were all badly damaged and there was a lot of smoke damage to any upstairs rooms where the doors weren’t closed,” said a garda source.
Gardaí have begun harvesting CCTV footage from other buildings on Dyke Parade as well as the nearby Mercy University Hospital and the Tyndall Institute in the hope of identifying the person or people responsible for the fire.
Gardaí say they are following a number of lines of inquiry, including one focusing on a row between some of the occupants of the buildings and a number of other parties on December 23rd, and they hope to take detailed witness statements from the four occupants over the coming days.
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