Lost Limerick

The complete absence of planning, decades of negligence by State services and the refusal to address the needs of these communities have resulted in lost estates in and around Limerick city. Wesley Liddy takes a walk around.

On Garyglass Ave, Ballinacurra Weston, shells of dead crabs are scattered amidst the debris of old bicycles, piping from houses and hundreds of beer cans. Drawn by the rubbish, seagulls have carried the crabs in from the River Shannon. There used to be a community centre on this site: it burned down years ago. There are houses ten yards from the site. The local residents have been complaining about rat infestation for years. This area of land is the responsibility of Limerick Corporation.

Yards away is the Clarina Park public housing scheme. The park was once the home of Shamrocks handball club. Their alleys have been knocked down and the area is a similar rubbish dump to the one in Garryglass. Ballinacurra Weston/ Prospect was built in the 1950s as part of Limerick Corporation's attempts to clear the inner city slums. One in three households here live on less than €12,945 per annum. This is less than half the national average.

Limerick is one of only four counties where the average income is above the State average, yet there remain pockets of extreme disadvantage. Seventy per cent of residents have not completed their Leaving Cert. Ballinacurra Weston/Prospect starts on Hyde Rd just after Limerick railway station. "Pride of the Yellow Road" is emblazoned on the wall of Quinlivan's pub, underneath a poster of Ireland rugby international Paul O'Connell. The last house in Weston has pigeon lofts painted black and amber, the colours of Young Munster rugby club.

Hyde Road is also home to Limerick's most infamous criminal family. On the corner of Hyde Rd and Lenihan Ave there are ten houses owned by the family. Five are burned out. Following the murder of rival crime boss, Kieran Keane, the Hyde Rd-based family fled to England. While they were gone their houses were petrol bombed. Twenty-foot boundary walls surround their main residence on the corner. The house and its surrounds are monitored by eight CCTV cameras and spotlights. Outside the house today are two jeeps, a camper van, a Mercedes Kompressor, a Ford Transit and two other vehicles. Reminders of the city's ongoing feud can be seen throughout the area. "Owen Treacey the rat" is written on several walls. Treacey was Kieran Keane's nephew, whose evidence in court led to five murder convictions. "Kanes are rats" ("Kane" is the local pronunciation of Keane) is written on others.

On the other side of Lenihan Ave is the shell of a house that was petrol bombed. The youngster who had lived in the house, who was then 15, failed to pay an outstanding drug debt to another local man. His house was attacked as a result. Nine other family members who had nothing to do with drugs were in the house at the time of the attack. His four-year-old sister was killed in the blaze.

A mile further along Childers Rd from Weston is Southill. O'Malley Park is the largest of the four estates that make up Southill. The approach to O'Malley Park is marked by an abandoned petrol station and The Olympic Arms pub, the scene of the murder of 19-year-old Michael Fitzpatrick in 1999. The estate was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, based on the Radburn layout of urban estates, which was popular at the time. A basic premise of the Radburn plan was that houses would face on to green spaces rather than roads. Many of these green spaces are now inhabited by, amongst other things, burnt out cars and household baths. Vehicular access would be achieved via laneways or courts behind the houses. Eight-foot walls meant to protect the houses effectively made these courts unmonitorable. They have long been centres of anti-social behaviour.

The haphazard development of the estate has also led to a situation where fronts of houses face onto the backs of others, while some houses face in the opposite direction to the rest of the estate. When the Corporation was housing families here, the people were drawn from all over the city and county. Years later Clonlong halting site was located at the top of the estate, creating further division in the area, between the settled and Traveller communities

In June 2004 a local GP told the Limerick Leader's Dearbhla Atcheson that he had treated eight separate incidents of gang rape in O'Malley Park. While the police received only one report, Dearbhla Atcheson interviewed women in the area, reporting that there had been up to 15 victims. These allegedly included a pregnant woman in her 20s, an 80-year-old raped in her kitchen and a 12-year-old-girl raped in her bedroom. As in Weston, residents of O'Malley Park are scared to speak out against the actions of a minority of people on the estate. State solicitor Michael Murray recently stated that one in six criminal cases in the city had to be abandoned due to witness intimidation.

In 2000, the postal service to the estate was disbanded after one postman was beaten unconscious with an iron bar. In 2003, bus services to the area were stopped following 130 separate attacks on vehicles and drivers. Attacks included spraying one driver in the face with an aerosol and brandishing a gun at another. In December 2005, the fire brigade came here to put out a burning car but had to stop when they came under attack by a gang of youths. Joyriding has reached epidemic proportions. Twenty-seven cars were burned out in a two-week period over Christmas 2005.

Southill has the highest proportion of long-term unemployed in the country. Just 5.9 per cent of people own their homes here. Over 100 homes have been destroyed since the estate was built in the 1970s, either by vandalism or demolition. A recently refurbished two-bedroom house is listed by auctioneers as selling at between €20,000 and €30,000, although one local resident said he would accept €7,000 for his home.

The majority of people on the estate are decent, law-abiding citizens. Tommy Dillon is one such person. He is also a cult figure in Limerick. Tommy, 63, has lived in the estate since the very beginning. He is the founder and president of the Southill powerlifting club. Tommy started the club in 1985, with its headquarters in a shed in his back garden. From that shed the club won two world titles and has added 36 more World or European championships since. Tommy says he feels safer walking around Southill than the city centre, but believes the design and location of the estate are responsible for many of the problems.

"When they first put us up here there was no electricity, no streetlights. The closest shop was in Rathbane [about one mile away]. No facilities. The club never had any bother because we always made everyone welcome; no young fella was turned away.

"When a young fella starts with us, the first thing we ask him is, does he have any experience of lifting and 75 per cent of them say they did a bit in jail. I have applied for funding so many times throughout the years: the way I look at it is what will cost them more, a set of weights or to keep a young fella in jail for a year?"

Tommy and the club recently received €250,000 to build an extension to the club, as part of a €15.8 million grant to the O'Malley Park regeneration committee. While Tommy was delighted about the extension, he said the attempts to upgrade houses in O'Malley were "30 years too late ... They should knock the fuckin' lot of them."

Located on the opposite side of the city, Moyross is the largest local authority estate in the Limerick region. Parts of Moyross are actually located in Co Clare, but fall under the jurisdiction of Limerick City Council. The area consists of 11 small estates or parks. The first areas of the estate were built in 1973, yet the housing was not completed in its entirety until 1987.

Moyross is the centre of the latest in a long line of violent family feuds in the city. One of the more prominent recent incidents was a drive-by shooting in Delmege Park where three teenagers were injured. The driver of the car involved was a local grandmother; her son pulled the trigger from the passenger seat beside her. The protagonists in this feud are mostly teenagers. These are the hardest age-group to get off the streets and get involved in community activities. One local community worker says: "The youngsters are great up until about 13 or 14, it's at that age you start to lose them. They want to be hanging around the roads or they won't come up to the youth clubs because we don't let them smoke."

The parks deeper into the estate are the newest and where much of the trouble in the area is taking place. Parts of College Park, Pineview Gardens and Delmege Park are in terrible condition. At the bottom of Pineview Gardens stands a wall 20 feet in height and several hundred meters in length. On the other side of the wall are the Limerick Institute of Technology's recently developed student village apartments and the suburban estate of Caherdavin. A razor wire runs the length of the wall. House prices vary by over €100,000 depending on which side of the wall they are situated.

Recently, five cars were burned in one night on the street outside a row of bungalows in Delmege Park. A youngster involved in burning the cars threw a drum of household gas onto the blaze. The flames from the resultant explosion threatened to engulf the houses on the street. In the middle of the night one resident of the street was forced to take his two children and head for a relative's house. The resident believes the Corporation "don't give a fuck" how many cars are torched here or how quickly they are removed.

Much of the rubbish that blights the landscape here is the result of what some locals have referred to as the "bin wars". Limerick Corporation has recently decided to increase the rates of the wheelie-bin service that is available on the estate. Refuse trucks attempted to travel through the estate collecting only the bins of people who had paid the charges. Locals who hadn't paid the fee attempted to throw their rubbish into the truck. Eventually, children started swinging from the back of the truck forcing it to pull out of the area on safety grounds. Three days later the trucks returned with a Garda escort, taking two hours to make their collections. Many residents, now without a waste service, have taken to dumping their household waste on the streets and greens that surround their homes.

The aforementioned community worker has much to say about his experiences working in the estate over the past 20 years.

"In the 1980s, the Corporation was offering £7,000 to anyone who would move from public to private housing. Brand new private houses were selling for about £21,000 back then, so a lot of people in areas like this one, people who had jobs and looked after their homes, left. That ripped the guts out of the place. These people would have been the people who volunteer to help out with local sports teams and things like that. I remember when Weston was after being built and there was fellows boxing one another up and down Hyde Road every night. An area like this needs time to settle, it's just that today they use guns, not their fists, to settle arguments".

While the community worker is critical of some of Limerick Corporation's action towards Moyross, he is also quick to point out what he labels the "dependency culture" in areas like this.

"When you have a kid who has maybe three older generations of his family still living and none of them have worked, it does start to become the norm, in their mind, that you don't have to work, or look after your house, because the corporation will."

Within Moyross there is a division between the majority of the estate and the area that was once known as Glenagross Park. Taxi drivers were once told never to collect or pick up in Glenagross. The area was referred to as "Beirut Alley". Glenagross was largely rebuilt a few years back and turned into five smaller estates. Many of the refurbished homes have been destroyed again. The deprivation here is comparable to that in O'Malley Park. Children's charity Barnardos has based local operations here, and there have been projects run under the RAPID (Revitalising Areas by Planning, Investment and Development) programme.

City councillor Kevin Kiely recently told several newspapers how families had been burning or abandoning their homes in order to be re-housed. Kiely manages the bar at Thomond rugby club, which is in the area. Following his revelations to the media, more than 200 holes were dug in the pitch at Fitzgerald Park, and the clubhouse was covered in graffiti calling the councillor a "rat". Local community workers do not want to comment on allegations that families have been abandoning their homes here.

There are also large parts of Moyross which are well kept and privately owned. Moyross has been used as a pilot scheme by local authorities and the Government and as a result has received huge funding compared to other areas. Moyross has an extensive CCTV network with 29 cameras monitored around the clock in the local community centre. Evidence taken from the cameras has led to four murder convictions in the past three years. For the most part, there are no burned out houses in areas covered by the cameras. Crime is also much lower in monitored areas. The addition of seven new cameras in the coming months will ensure there are no blind spots left in the estate.

Moyross is very much on an upward curve. A Supervalu was recently built in the area along with a petrol station and late night pharmacy. A library is currently under construction. In the centre of the estate is the Moyross community enterprise centre, one of two community centres in the area. The centres have won several awards at local and national level for both their maintenance and achievements.

The second community service centre for the Moyross area is on the edge of the estate. It includes a boxing and a kick-boxing club, an indoor soccer pitch, the Moyross probation service and a youth club called Shades, a local term used to refer to the gardaí, who contribute to the running of the club. The youth club caters for up to 100 children per week. There are over a dozen snooker and pool tables and plasma-screen televisions. The vandalism here extends only to some names scratched onto the bathroom doors.

The hope for the future of Moyross is largely based around ensuring the children of this generation receive a good education. The local community workers liaise closely with Corpus Christi primary school and St Nessan's secondary school, both of which are in the area, and are trying to forge links with the nearby Institute of Technology. With funding now being made available for the re-development of O'Mallley Park, Moyross can potentially act as a template for how to improve other communities in and around Limerick city. p