Ballymun double murder: ‘The innocents are always the victims’

Queenie Barnes spent decades as a community activist in Ballymun. She misses the work but at 79 she doesn't want to go back.

“The work that I done years ago, it was dangerous work. If I did it today I’d be shot,” she said as she stood in front of her house on Balbutcher Road watching gardaí search for bullet casings.

Life was slowly returning to normal on Thursday after the murder of two people on the road the previous day. However people are still scared.

“They men got away, who knows if they’ll come back,” Queenie said referring to the two gunmen.

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As she talks, Queenie, who is known as the “Taoiseach of Ballymun” because of her community work, is interrupted every few minutes by a passer-by who wants to say hello or exchange a joke.

“Well done love,” she shouts to a girl. “What did you get, 400?” The teenager replies that it was actually 430.

“She just got her Leaving Cert. She’s going to Trinity,” Queenie explains.

The girl was one of the few young people on the streets. Normally in the middle of August the estates and greens in this part of Ballymun are teeming with boys and girls playing or cycling their bikes.

“The atmosphere is not right on the road today. Look there’s no kids outside. Not a child,” says Queenie’s neighbour. “My grandchildren were over this morning and I wouldn’t let them out.”

Balbutcher Drive is an old community. Many residents moved there when the famous Ballymun flats came down. Queenie came here 22 years ago from the Eamonn Ceannt Tower, located where the new swimming pool now stands.

"I used to cycle from there every day to Cherry Orchard to visit them that were dying of Aids. Then I'd go to Mountjoy and see lads in there. And I worked all around Ballymun.

“I wouldn’t do it now,” she repeats.

She wasn’t here when the shooting happened; she was getting her hair done. But her neighbour - who didn’t wish to be named - was in the kitchen.

She said she heard a series of bangs and assumed it was the person next door doing DIY.

“Then my son told me not to go out, that there was a car outside. That was the shooter’s car,” the woman said, indicating the spot where an Opel Zafira had been parked until when gardaí removed it for examination on Wednesday night.

“They tried to burn it out but the coppers got buckets of water and put it out.”

Queenie came back from her errands to find gardaí swarming the area. She ran into the dead woman’s former husband. Gardaí wouldn’t let him near the scene.

"I got him in. I told the ban garda to go and get the inspector and tell him to let him. He was in an awful state."

A son of the deceased woman later appeared at the entrance to the road demanding to see his mother. Eventually he was let in too.

“That woman was born and reared here, everybody knew her. Nobody seems to know him though, he didn’t live around here. Neither of them did anything wrong,” another neighbour said.

“This is what happens. The innocents are always the victims.”