Conor Reddy

Yeah, look, it is shocking, but it's not new.

These leaflets, as far as I understand, were reissued recently, but they'd been issued a couple of months ago too.

Unfortunately, we've had a feud that's been left to fester

over several months, there have been numerous shooting incidents, there were shots fired at shops, shots fired in public areas, there have been shots fired at houses, there have been arson attacks, there have been violent assaults on people in public.

And what we've seen over the last week is just the latest kind of incidents of that.

So I think this is crisis management.

We do need to get back into the realms of prevention, but it's crisis management for now.

That's the reality that we've been living in.

And I think it has to be a turning point now that the spotlight is on what people in Ballymun have been forced to live with.

Everyone deserves to live with safety, whether from Ballymun or Donnybrook or any other part of Dublin.

I don't want to overdramatise things, but I think there is an obvious awareness there.

Like there's a problem with open air drug dealing in the area that's quite entrenched now in certain pockets.

There's a violence that goes with that.

There is a much greater degree of exposure to this type of thing than you get in any other typical community in Ireland.

And that's a real negative.

It's not for lack of effort or trying on the part of the community.

The huge number of really dedicated people working in the community voluntary sector in Ballymun.

They know what solutions are needed.

They put in huge work, go beyond the call of duty.

But unfortunately, they've been kind of left