In the nightmarish landscape of O'Malley Park, entire blocks are abandoned or burnt out. People live behind boarded-up windows and admit to living in fear of guns, drugs and murderous under-age thugs. Women walking their children home from school say they were both angry and terrified by the latest attack on a five-year-old, writes Kathy Sheridan in Southill, Limerick.
"I don't hear anyone talking up for us who knows what it's like in here. Really like in here. We can't talk up for ourselves because we know what would happen. It could be my daughter or her children. They'd begin by smashing in your windows. You would have no life."
A young woman points at houses down the hill.
"Elderly people live down there behind steel shutters. They spend their lives in the dark, behind them shutters, in fear of their lives."
Another woman points to a burnt-out house across the road from which she says a single woman barely escaped with her life in recent days.
Her crime was to have a brother - who does not live with her - who has fallen foul of a drugs gang.
Members of this gang had broken down doors of neighbouring houses, pointed guns at cowering residents, climbing stairs and walking in and out of bedrooms in the search for their quarry.
Evidence of their anarchic assaults on people's lives and property is all around.
John Crawford's home carries the marks of the 17 bullet rounds sprayed at the 71-year-old's home last Thursday, by a gunman believed to have targeted his son, Paul.
The one that went through the window finally smashed off the kitchen tiles at the back of the house.
"We're used to it," said John Crawford.
According to his daughter, Sandra, the family had been warned.
"They told us Thursday morning outside the court . . . They were arguing and roaring, 'You're going to be out [ of Southill] as well'."
On Sunday night, "they" were back. They turned up in what Sandra describes as "their own car", a wine-coloured Toyota Corolla, smashed the window of her car to lure the family outside, and then "tore off", leaving an armed figure in a hoodie standing on the footpath opposite.
Sandra remembers only one shot, the one that smashed into five-year-old Jordan Crawford's thigh.
Jordan's brother, nine-year-old Dylan, "ran away in shock", said his grandfather.
"He's out in the country with another daughter. I don't know what's going to happen."
His wife, Mary, says she has no idea what the motive might be.
"Limerick is too small. I wish to God I knew what they were fighting over. I want no trouble. I reared a big family and had problems all my life."
She admits that she is a "bag of nerves", but swears that she will not be frightened out of her home of 37 years. Seven of the 12 Crawford siblings still live in Southill.
"I'm not moving. They can burn me out of it. I'd just build it up again. Why should I move for them?"
Yesterday morning a meeting between five local councillors, Garda Supt Gerry Mahon and a housing department official took place as scheduled to discuss the burning out of a house in Southill last week.
In the afternoon, however, locals were amazed to see O'Malley Park suddenly inundated with gardaí on foot, detectives in plain clothes, and in Garda vans.
"In normal times, you'd ring them three times and they wouldn't come . . . You'd be hung, drawn and quartered before they'd pay any attention to you," said a woman.
"This shooting was not an impulse," said Fine Gael city councillor Diarmuid Scully. "This was someone with a semi-automatic weapon who had planned an act of intimidation as part of an ongoing struggle for control of the drugs trade . . . No matter what is planned for this area, it all comes back to security. People have to feel safe before anything else will work."