Guns and grenades on the northside bring scenes of horror to innocent people in Cork

Searches were conducted on waste ground at Blackstone Bridge on Thursday and at a premises in Blarney, just hours before Justice Minister Helen McEntee was due in Cork to open a new crime victims service in the city centre.

She arrived to a city that had seen armed checkpoints in the past week as gardaí try to control tensions between two extended families involved in a feud, while the release last month of violent criminal Gavin Sheehan, aged in his 30s, of Laurel Ridge, Shanakiel, Cork, also helped fuel tensions in the city’s north western suburbs.

Although unconnected, both have the potential to bring horror and fear to innocent people — including a man in his 60s who is recovering from multiple surgeries after being struck by a motorbike linked to the feud as he was walking on Churchfield Rd on August 23.

Only in recent days, children of a school on Blarney Street were being collected in the afternoon while two men were involved in an altercation which spilled from one footpath onto the busy road. No complaint has been made to gardaí but efforts have been taken locally to prevent a similar incident from occurring again, said one source.

Videos of the incident have circulated on social media and it is understood a number of people have been advised to stay away from the vicinity of the school.

Messaging apps are also inundated with images, videos and concerns about a series of incidents in the past two weeks, including:

• August 23: Criminal damage was caused at a property in the Shanakiel area — the home of Gavin Sheehan. A short time later, an innocent man walking along Churchfield Rd was seriously injured by a motorcycle linked to the incident. A man has been charged in connection with both incidents.
• August 26: A suspected petrol bomb attack at a house in Aikenhead Place, Gurranabraher, at around 10pm. The device was thrown through a window of the house but failed to detonate.
• August 30: A shot was fired through the window of a house in Palmbury Orchard in Togher shortly after 11.30pm. Nobody was injured.
• August 31: A shot was fired at a house on Innishannon Rd in Fairhill at approximately 10.45pm. Nobody was home at the time.
• September 1: Just before midnight, a suspected grenade was thrown at a house in Meadow Park Avenue in Ballyvolane but failed to detonate. The Defence Forces carried out a controlled explosion after locals were evacuated and a cordon was put in place.
• September 1: Damage was caused to Murphy’s Rock pub on Ballincollie Rd in Ballyvolane in a suspected petrol bomb attack. A man has been charged in connection with the incident. 

While the incident at Murphy’s Rock is unconnected to any feud, it occurred at a time when concerns were already high in the Ballyvolane area, where the incident at Meadow Park Avenue has been linked by gardaí to the incidents in Palmbury Orchard in Togher and the shot fired at the house on Innishannon Rd in Fairhill.

Locals say the tensions between the sides have been simmering for more than a year, with other incidents said to have taken place in the past 18 months.

The incident outside the school on Monday has been linked to the tensions arising from the release of Gavin Sheehan in recent weeks.

Sheehan — who has more than 70 convictions — was attacked in the city centre yesterday evening and is recovering in hospital. He was released last month from Castlerea Prison after serving eight years for shooting a woman in the neck.

At his sentencing hearing, he admitted that he had been a Garda informer. His victim in that case was a woman who was in a relationship with a member of family with whom Sheehan was in dispute. She was shot in her family home in Hollywood Estate in May 2016.

In her victim impact statement in Sheehan’s trial, she described herself as being “completely broken” by the incident.

After his conviction for assault causing serious harm and for three firearms offences at Laurel Ridge, Shanakiel, on May 15, 2016, he took a challenge to the Court of Appeal and then to the Supreme Court. His bid for freedom was rejected by the Supreme Court in July 2021.

During his trial at Cork Circuit Court, the court heard that he had earlier assaulted the young woman’s boyfriend in a chip shop in Blackpool. Later that night, windows were broken at Sheehan’s home, followed by the shooting of the young woman in Hollywood Estate in the early hours of the following morning.

The woman required emergency surgery and had a bullet removed from her neck, where it had lodged in a muscle.

Sheehan challenged the conviction by arguing that his trial judge wrongly refused to allow him to discharge his legal representatives at the start of the trial and that provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 1984, as amended by the Criminal Justice Act 2007 — which permit inferences to be drawn from responses to Garda questioning — were wrongly applied in the trial.

The five-judge Supreme Court’s ruling was that it could not find that Sheehan had made a voluntary and informed decision to waive his right to legal representation and represent himself at the trial.

Judge Iseult O’Malley said she was satisfied there was no miscarriage of justice in his case.

Garda sources readily admit privately that his return to the city has unsettled the northwest of the city.

They say investigations are continuing into all incidents, with sources saying the city is now “busy” from a crime perspective, given the two different sets of tensions which combined which have cultivated a state of fear amid the escalation in the past two weeks.

Ballyvolane councillor, Labour’s John Maher, described the recent incidents as “frightening” for the local community.

He said: “What’s happening in our community in Ballyvolane is frightening and not a true picture of this fantastic community.

“I hope gardaí have the resources necessary to put an end to this series of attacks. The majority of our community deserve to live in peace and enjoy their life.”

Meanwhile, the chairman of Cork City’s joint policing committee, Damian Boylan, has called on anyone in the community who can help bring an end to the tensions to do their best to do so.

He said: “I don’t know if a garda on the street would have stopped people from firing a hand grenade at a house. Whatever about gardaí being on the streets, what is going on on the northside is advanced criminality and the only way to deal with that is through intelligence.”

He believes the community has a significant role to play in helping to bring calm to the area: 

People need to interact with the community gardaí, they need to come forward, they need to let the gardaí know and help in any way they can to solve this. 

Since last weekend’s escalation, Sinn Féin TD for Cork North-Central, Thomas Gould, has written to Ms McEntee asking for a meeting with her and local gardaí. He has not received a commitment for such a meeting yet and is disappointed the opportunity did not arise during the minister’s visit to Cork on Thursday afternoon.

Although Garda numbers in Cork City jumped from 578 at the end of December 2022 to 702 at the end of last year, they have fallen from the 730 who were in place at the end of 2021.

Mr Gould says a concentrated effort needs to be made on tackling criminals in the city through the deployment of extra gardaí.

He said: “It is only a matter of time before someone is killed and we will have condemnation then from everyone. I want to see what happened in Limerick where extra gardaí were brought in. People are absolutely terrified.”