Gardaí in Cork believe the shooting of a 14-year-old boy in the city yesterday afternoon is related to an ongoing feud between two families, which has threatened to spill over into violence in the past few weeks, writes Barry Roche, Southern Correspondent, in Cork.
Detectives said the shooting of the teenager in Farran Street, Blackpool, was intended as a warning to a Cork family by a gang with links to a major criminal family from Clare but with a base in north Cork.
The boy was walking up Farran Street from Gerald Griffin Street on Cork's northside with two other youths just after 2pm, when a car pulled up on Gerald Griffin Street and a gunman fired one or possibly two shots with a shotgun from the car.
According to Garda sources, the injured youth received bruising in the back from the gunshot wound, but they are satisfied the shot was fired from such a distance that the gunman's intention was to scare rather than kill the youths.
The alarm was raised and the boy was taken by ambulance to the Mercy University Hospital near the city centre, where his injury was found to be not life-threatening.
His two companions were understood to be shaken but uninjured.
Gardaí have been trying to establish if the gunman was the driver or a front-seat passenger in the car, which they described as a dark-coloured Ford Mondeo with a 97C registration.
They later located a Ford Mondeo fitting the description of the car used in the shooting abandoned in a field in the Watergrasshill area of north Cork, some 15 miles from the city, and carried out a preliminary examination of the area around the car.
The car was not burned out and officers last night removed it to Togher Garda station to conduct a technical examination of the vehicle.
Back in Blackpool gardaí carried out a technical examination of the scene of the shooting and removed material from the ground before allowing pedestrian access to the street. They focused on a wall which took some of the blast.
Gardaí had already been investigating reports of a shooting in the area last Friday night and they believe yesterday's incident was but the latest in an ongoing dispute between a family from Cork's northside and the Clare criminal gang.