An Irishman’s Diary about the 10th anniversary of a Dublin shooting

Ten years ago this week, I was on a press trip to Tel Aviv. It seemed a very dangerous city at the time. A short-lived ceasefire had just ended with a Palestinian suicide bomb on a seafront nightclub near where I was staying.

All the bars in the area now had men on the door to prevent similar attacks. So when I went out for a drink with locals one night soon after arriving, the conversation was dominated by the emotional logistics of living in such an environment.

There was grim fascination on my part, a mixture of stoicism and machismo from my hosts.

But in the midst of it, I had to excuse myself to make a phone-call home. Whereupon I learned from my children that there had been some kind of “robbery” in our Dublin 8 neighbourhood.

Details were confused until my wife came on and, lowering her voice, explained that in fact it was a fatal shooting, just down the road. She’d been woken the night before by the shots. Now gardaí were everywhere, and residents had to be logged in and out of the crime scene. “I’m telling the kids it was a break-in,” she said.

Feud

As I learned afterwards, the dead man was John Roche – a victim of the so-called Crumlin-Drimnagh feud. The feud was already five years old by then – to the day, in fact – having begun on March 9th, 2000, when a Garda drugs raid on a Dublin hotel split the youthful gang involved into two mutually suspicious factions.

In the ensuing spiral of destruction, Roche was the fourth person to be killed. His brother Noel would follow him six months later. By the time it was all over – if it is – there were 16 dead.

Dispute

Along the way, the dispute rippled far beyond the two suburbs for which it was named. John Roche died in Kilmainham, his brother in Clontarf. There were also shootings in Co Laois, and in Spain. Later in 2005, working the night shift in

The Irish Times

, I had to go from writing a “colour” piece on the premiere of a Harry Potter film to the scene of a double murder in Firhouse. That too was the Crumlin-Drimnagh feud.

Anyway, I didn’t know most of this on that night in Tel Aviv. So apart from touching briefly on the irony of the news from peaceful Dublin, the resumed conversation was mainly about another, greater and more ancient feud, then breaking out anew.

As recently as weeks earlier, there had been unfounded optimism about an Israeli-Palestinian entente, with the old hardliner Ariel Sharon taking on his own right wing, the new Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas urging an end to the Second Intifada, and the ceasefires holding, more or less.

It was the combination of this relative peace, combined with an impending World Cup qualifier between Israel and the Republic of Ireland, that inspired the idea to invite Irish journalists over to showcase the new Tel Aviv, especially its nightlife.

“It’s quite safe,” I assured my wife the day I agreed to go. Then, that very evening, we turned on the news to hear of the bomb at the nightclub. So by the time I reached Tel Aviv, the focus of the trip had shifted somewhat, and I found myself sharing the natives’ siege mentality.

Optimism

I haven’t been back in that part of the world since, and there hasn’t been much optimism emanating from it in the intervening decade. But the imminent elections in Israel are now again raising the possibility of a renewed peace process. And I’m pleased to see that a man with strong Dublin connections – Dublin 8 at that – is leading the opposition to the incumbent.

As Ruadhán Mac Cormaic has reported elsewhere in these pages, Labor leader Isaac Herzog is only one generation removed from Portobello, where his father Chaim grew up en route to becoming Israeli president.

So, even allowing for the confusion of religions, it must be a good omen for Herzog jnr that the elections are on St Patrick’s Day.

In a different part of Dublin 8, meanwhile, we maintained until very recently the fiction that what happened that night in 2005 was a burglary. I’m sure the kids worked out the truth on their own eventually.

In any case, every year in early March, a bunch of flowers is pinned to a lamppost at the spot, with a note attached. This year’s note remembers “John Roche, 25, murdered here by cowards, 9th March 2005, loved and missed every day by his Mam, Brothers, Sisters, Nephews, Nieces”.

@FrankmcnallyIT