'The likes of what has happened in this case has never been encountered in this court before,' said Justice Carney, releasing the jury after Liam Keane's trial collapsed. But this week the fear in Keane's home city was palpable, reports Conor Lally in Limerick.
It all started over an Alsatian pup. But the tragic events that unfolded just over two years ago on Limerick's Kings Island were to tear apart the friendships of a group of young men, leaving two of them dead and their families grieving forever.
This week Liam Keane, the 19-year-old accused of one of the murders, walked free from court after six witnesses changed their evidence or retracted statements. Earlier in the trial, Justice Carney had described witnesses as suffering from "collective amnesia". Photographs of Keane, fingers cocked in the V sign, dominated newspaper front pages on Tuesday.
Releasing the jury, Justice Carney said: "The likes of what has happened in this case has never, I can assure you, been encountered in this court before".
The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, faced an onslaught from the Opposition. He responded immediately by allocating an extra €2 million to fighting gang crime. He said he was considering changing the laws of evidence in criminal trials.
Residents and community activists in Limerick this week said they were sickened by the collapse of the trial and Keane's smirking face as he walked from court. The Garda helicopter could be seen on Thursday in the skies above the city, deployed because of heightened tensions on the ground. Limerick's violence was back in the news. Many in the communities afflicted by the feud and other unrelated violence were already dreading the long hours of winter darkness which would give troublemakers a greater opportunity to go about their business. There are few now who have any optimism about the months to come.
To make sense of the events of the last week it is necessary to go back 26 months. Jonathan Edwards, Eric Leamy, Liam Keane and Willie Moran Jnr had grown up together in the working-class communities of Limerick. But in August 2001, there began a brief and savage chain of events that would see two of them cut down in their prime.
On that summer night, 21-year-old Jonathan Edwards, from Abbeyvale, Corbally, visited the Lee Estate. He had gone there to collect an Alsatian pup.
Shortly after picking up the dog, Edwards met with a group of men known to him. One of the group objected to Edwards kicking the dog. Edwards responded by returning the pup and leaving the area.
However, Edwards later came back accompanied by another man. A fight ensued with 18-year-old Eric Leamy. The teenager was unarmed and urged his attacker to put away the knife he was carrying, the Central Criminal Court was told last week. It was an appeal that fell on deaf ears. Within moments, Leamy was stabbed. He died a few days later.
Liam Keane was charged with the murder but walked free from court on Monday.
The day after Leamy's murder, Willie Moran Jnr, Leamy's best friend, encountered Jonathan Edwards in St Mary's Park. Moran picked up an aluminium bar and hit Edwards over the head. Edwards sustained fractures to his skull, resulting in bleeding around the brain. While unconscious, he developed pneumonia and died.
Moran went voluntarily to Mayorstone Garda Station. He admitted hitting Edwards but insisted he had done so in self-defence. He told gardaí that Edwards had tried to assault him and had taunted him that he would be killed like his friend Leamy.
The prosecution described the killing of Edwards as a revenge attack for that of Leamy. But the jury was told that if it believed Moran had hit Edwards in self-defence it should acquit him, which it did.
With the collapse of Liam Keane's trial the devastating events of those two days in August came back to haunt the Government, the people of Limerick and the families of all involved.
Eric Leamy's parents spoke out for the first time on Thursday. They described how they had been shattered by Leamy's murder, saying their lives were "nothing without him".
Leamy's mother, Geraldine, said she and her husband, Anthony, go to Mount St Oliver Cemetery for hours every day to visit their son's grave.
"We feel closer to our son there," she said. "We love him so much we can't let him go. I miss my son so very much. My son was no druggie or drunk. He was a very good and kind loving son. He loved his family. Even now, two years on, we find it very difficult to even go into his room. It is still laid out the same way it was on that night [when he died]. Little did we know it would be the last time we would see Eric alive.
"Our sitting room is a shrine to our son. We have pictures of him from a baby up to his Confirmation and of him with his soccer teams."
Coming after the media's recent intense focus on the feuding in Limerick - the drug-dealing, the petrol-bombing of homes, the killing of young men, armed Garda patrols on the streets - Geraldine Leamy's words were a stark reminder that the city's crime situation has a high human price. Young lives are being snuffed out and the stakes are small. Unlike Dublin, the drugs industry in Limerick is not very significant. Cannabis is the drug of choice, followed by ecstasy. Cocaine and heroin are sold in limited amounts. But despite the small scale of the "industry" the city's gangs have easy access to weapons and they are willing to use them.
The fighting is motivated by personal grudges just as much as it is by any desire to corner the drugs market. Away from the well- documented feud the city seems to be home to a substantial number of young men who resort to serious violence to resolve minor disputes. Two men ending up dead in a row over a dog is just one such example.
The Leamys were described by neighbours as good, honest, working-class people. Eric was not involved in criminal activity. He worked in Tesco, he played soccer, loved music, his family, and his girlfriend.
Speaking to locals on the ground this week the sense of anger is palpable. Most people can't see an end to the violence. By and large they think gardaí are doing their best. But there is a sense that the Government is reaping what it sowed.
Locals believe Limerick has been neglected at every level for decades. They say gardaí in the city are seriously under-resourced, despite what senior officers say publicly. One garda who spoke to The Irish Times in Limerick this week said he believed the Government was now out of touch with the demands on the Garda Síochána.
"Ten years ago or so we didn't have to do any work on immigration, for example," he said. "We have also had other pressures put on our time recently with penalty points. The new PULSE system was supposed to cut down on time spent on admin but is so slow it takes hours to input even a minor case. All over the country frontline policing has lost members to specialist units like the Criminal Assets Bureau, fraud squad, immigration bureau and the rest of it. Drugs are now in all parts of Ireland and in record amounts, and despite all of that the size of the force hasn't been increased. People say why don't the guards just sit outside the houses of people they know are drug-dealing or whatever. But at the end of the day you can slag us all you like but if we haven't got the numbers there is only so much we can do."
Last month the Garda Commissioner, Noel Conroy, told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice that limited resources meant it was difficult to mount surveillance operations against known criminals, with "six or seven" officers required for each suspect targeted.
"I simply don't have those resources," Conroy said.
While Michael McDowell announced €2 million in extra funding to fight gang crime around the country, most people in Limerick believe that even if gardaí in their city were given all of that money it would still not be enough. They say there is a lot more to Limerick's problems than simply catching the bad guys.
Community workers point to the lack of investment in youthprojects and early intervention services for children in Limerick's poorest estates as proof that the city is at the bottom of the Government's priorities.
The Kings Island Youth and Community Centre is a case in point. Kings Island is where many of the players involved in the city's publicised violence reside. Both Eric Leamy and Jonathan Edwards died there.
Last Tuesday, just hours before McDowell announced his €2 million anti-crime package, the centre's heating system gave up the ghost. The centre's chairman Paddy Mason says he needs €3,000 to replace the boiler. The centre has less than €1,200 in the bank. Its only source of revenue comes from renting the hall. It receives no public funding. Without an injection of money it will be forced to close. Around 30 local children will lose their crèche and more than 100 teenagers from Kings Island will have no youth club.
Mason says he cannot understand why money is available for Garda overtime while his centre and others like it, which aim to prevent children coming to the attention of gardaí in the first place, are left to struggle on from one year to the next. "If it goes, the kids are hanging around the street corners. No good can come of that," he says.
At Limerick Youth Services, director Catherine Kelly tells a similar story. But she has high hopes for Limerick. She believes the development of the last 20 years has lifted the entire city. Limerick may still have serious problems, she says, but the bleak days of the 1980s, when unemployment in areas like Moyross reached 80 per cent, are gone forever.
Her organisation is a registered charity. It has 73 staff and a budget of around €3.5 million a year. It sounds impressive but when she speaks of places like St Mary's Park you fear for Limerick. The Youth Services has sufficient funding and personnel to run youth projects for just 20 children two nights a week, in an area with over 4,000 homes. In O'Malley Park there are 601 homes, but the youth club there reaches just 25 young people. In Moyross it runs four intervention programmes for around 120 children aged 10 to 16 years old. But there are seven other housing estates in the area that are not serviced at all.
"It costs up to €200,000 to keep someone in jail for a year. We could run a very good project for up to 60 with that kind of money," Kelly says.
One community activist says he doubts if the events of the last year will do anything to focus the Government's minds on Limerick.
"Little kids on the streets here, four or five, can tell you there's so and so gone up the road in the car, they're on this or that side of the feud. It's getting to the stage in some areas where lads are not turning on the radio in the morning to get the sports results, they're turning it on to see if anybody has been shot."
Few would believe we've heard the last of such news bulletins.