The first sign something was wrong came from the barely perceptible blue streak that flashed across my front room window shortly before 3pm last Sunday.
It was so fast and so fleeting that it did little more than dance on the fringes of my consciousness before disappearing. I wondered at the time if I’d imagined it – Garda cars on Oxmantown Road in Stoneybatter are not uncommon, but they’re never going that fast.
The second sign came seconds later when my phone pinged. Delighted at the excuse to desist from the dull domestic chore that had otherwise been occupying my mind, I picked it up.
It was a WhatsApp from my neighbours – a lovely bunch of young and talented actors who routinely serve as a secondary post office for postal deliveries.
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This message was different, though.
“Be very careful. Two people got stabbed in Niall Street out the back of us just a few min ago,” it said.
As I read it, I looked up from my phone to see another blue flash, slower this time, streaking silently past my window, then another and then a fourth.
I raced to the front door, tripping inelegantly over a mountain of shoes and toys in a way reporters in movies or TV programmes seldom do.
Eventually I opened my front door, just in time to see an ambulance shrieking its way past and to hear a first responder shrieking at people to get inside and stay there.
My neighbour – who’d just sent the WhatsApp – was standing on the pavement, ashen-faced.
“There’s a guy around the corner covered in blood. We called the ambulance but I don’t know if he is okay. I don’t know what’s happening. Other people have been stabbed.”
My wife was returning home from a children’s birthday party, with my youngest singing in the back of the car, and messaged me while stopped in traffic nearby.
“Go take a look at the top of the road,” she texted, breezily oblivious to the shocking story unfolding so close to home.
One of my older daughters came to the door to see what was causing the commotion.
“People have been stabbed, go inside and lock the door. I’m going for a look,” I said.
She stared at me like I’d told her I was off to the moon. “What? No. Don’t do that, come inside,” she replied, reasonably.
I assured her that with so many guards, firefighters and paramedics around I’d be grand, and walked-ran to the top of the road, past dozens of neighbours peering out front doors, faces creased with confusion and concern.
Oxmantown Road has been through a lot since the first houses sprang up in 1891. In the early days it was an undesirable address, with the tenement dwellers from off O’Connell Street unwilling to move so far out of town.
Then the road became more attractive – what with its running water and everything – then rundown, and then really rundown, when the complex of since-demolished council flats known as O’Devaney Gardens became riddled with the heroin scourge of the 1970s.
The current gentrification wave, the one that would see Stoneybatter earn itself the reputation of being one of the ‘coolest’ places in the world, began in earnest in the late 1990s.
Today there are people on the road whose families started renting off the Dublin Artisans' Dwelling Company in the 1940s, and people who paid half a million euro for their home. There are some paying sky-high interest rates on huge mortgages, some who own their homes outright, and some in social housing.
High-end EVs are parked outside some houses and are passed daily by people on horses and young fellas wearing balaclavas doing wheelies on scrambler motorbikes in the dead of night.
It is a proper melting pot of a place but, despite the diversity, there was only one question on everyone’s lips last Sunday.
What’s happening?
What was happening at that moment was that gardaí were blocking off the warren of streets while ambulance personnel treated the wounded men before bringing them to the Mater hospital nearby.
An easy-to-follow trail of stony-faced gardaí led from Oxmantown Road on to Carnew Street, which runs parallel. The grim blue line went past the gate of St Gabriel’s National School and back on to Oxmantown Road, up to my front door and on to Niall Street where the third stabbing took place.
I tried to find out what was going on but the emergency services were as confused and concerned as us locals. Multiple victims, lots of blood, no idea where the attacker was.
Shortly after 3pm, word rippled up from Manor Place, less than 500 metres away, that someone had been detained, by which time dozens of my neighbours had gathered in little clusters to play a surreal game of Chinese whispers. Rumours swirled – most of which proved to be unfounded. The emergency services dispersed as darkness fell and were replaced by TV cameras, while the sense of community Stoneybatter is rightly known for emerged.
The question people were asking face-to-face and via text was a simple “are you okay?”
It was only hours after things settled that I – and I suspect many of my neighbours – started replaying the fuzzy scenes, imagining what might have been and how much worse things could have got.
A man was stabbed on Niall Street, less than 50 metres from my front door, 10 minutes before my wife pulled up with our seven-year-old. They pulled up 10 minutes late after taking a wrong turn in Finglas.
The boyfriend of my next-door neighbour had his car parked where that stabbing took place and wasn’t there at the precise moment it happened because he was “faffing”, getting his bag together.
Random decisions and moments kept people safe just as they put people in danger. It was a shocking Sunday for sure, the like of which the road has never seen before, but we all know it could have been a whole lot worse were it not for a sense of community and the speed with which the blue lights streaked past all our windows.
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