Dublin shooting: ‘We’ve got to get the guns out of Ballymun’

“We’ve got to get the guns out of Ballymun,” a local Dublin councillor has warned after a garda and another man were shot and injured during a drug seizure on Thursday morning.

Just hours later children, teenagers and their parents on the school run stopped to look at the cordoned off scene outside a house on Barnewell Drive.

The incident took place during a garda operation that was targeting organised crime.

The exchange of gunfire took place at the same house where a young man was shot and wounded last month.

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Two women and a man, aged in their 30s and 40s, have been arrested and are currently being questioned at Ballymun, Clontarf and Swords Garda stations.

Labour Cllr Andrew Montague said guns in Ballymun was ‘completely unacceptable’.

“There is a lot of open drug dealing, it’s a huge problem right across the city and it’s very difficult to deal with,” he said.

“We’re very lucky that there was nobody seriously injured, but it just have easily been a fatality here this morning. We can’t put up with that.

“This is an area full of families full of people who are working hard to keep their families together. This is the last thing they want.”

Cllr Montague said the local community are “shocked” adding “this does not represent what ordinary people of the area are like.”

An elderly woman who has been living in the area for almost 20 years said she was not surprised about the latest incident.

“I was dropping my grandkids to school and one of the neighbours told me what happened,” she said.

“I’m not surprised, it’s terrible what’s going on but it’s only getting worse.

“You used to never hear of this happening in Ballymun years ago, now it’s just commonplace.”

A young woman, who has lived in Ballymun her whole life, said her brother had woken her after he heard about the shooting on the news.

“There was a shooting at that same house a few weeks ago, I had heard there were bullet proof windows installed since,” she said.

“I’m just glad there were no kids around as it happened just before they would have been leaving for school.”

Local councillor Paul McAuliffe said the morning’s operation showed how regularly the gardaí put their “life on the line to protect the community”.

“They desperately need more resources,”he said.

“In recent weeks we’ve been calling for the gardaí to increase patrols in Ballymun to tackle open drug dealing”.