It was after 9pm in Paris on Friday.
Cormac Flynn, his boyfriend and two of their friends were having dinner at Le Centenaire, a restaurant in the city's 11th arrondissement.
Later, Flynn would recall how the route he walked to the restaurant that night brought him past Le Bataclan, the well-known music venue on Boulevard Voltaire.
As he walked past the venue, he would recall, he had to push his way through crowds of people smoking or queuing to get in. It was such a normal Friday night scene it barely registered at the time.
Flynn's group had a table at the back of the restaurant. As they ate, he noticed some talk on Twitter about an explosion at the Stade de France, but firm information was thin on the ground and he didn't think much of it.
Probably fireworks, he thought.
Then, when commotion broke out at the front of the restaurant and he heard people say someone had blood on him, Flynn assumed there had been a fight.
"My friend went forward to try and see what was going on, and he said two people had been shot," says Flynn, a 35-year-old web developer from Dundalk who has been living in Paris for almost nine years.
Charlie Hebdo
"Because the Charlie Hebdo killings had happened a few months ago, and that was just down the road, we figured immediately it might be something like that."
The two gunshots victims - one had been shot in the leg, the other in the stomach - had fled the Bataclan through the back door that leads onto rue Amelot - the street where the restaurant is located.
Some staff and customers set about trying to stop the bleeding, and the owners offered to bring the pair down the cellar, where they might feel safer.
“After a few minutes, they turned off all the lights in the restaurant and blew out all the candles. Everybody went down low, and then later on we all went down on the floor,” Flynn says.
A short time later, police arrived and ordered everybody to climb the stairwell of the adjoining residential building. “Some people were calm and some were very, very upset,” he recalls. Still, they didn’t quite know what was happening outside.
“I knew there was a hostage situation in the Bataclan, but I only subsequently realised there were these simultaneous attacks going on.
“I didn’t know until later on that there were suicide bombings at the Stade de France. I thought it was just a bomb.
“Everybody was on the phone the whole time - ringing people and checking things. Some people were smoking. It was quiet most of the time.
“It was unreal - there was a numbness to it all. When any major event happens, when someone dies, it’s the same feeling - disconnect from what’s going on around you.”
After about two hours in the stairwell, police ushered the group of 30 to 40 people out of the restaurant and hurried them across Boulevard Beaumarchais towards the Marais.
Phalanx of police
As they ran across the deserted road, a phalanx of police officers pointed their machine guns at the surrounding rooftops, seemingly to provide some cover. After spending another few hours holed up in an Italian restaurant, the group finally received the all-clear and were allowed to leave.
Flynn says he feels “numb” this weekend.
On the Monday after the Charlie Hebdo killings in January, he felt nervous taking the metro, and remembers having “a much more emotional reaction to the whole thing than I had expected”.
This time, it feels more personal. The targets were more random, and the streets where the massacre took place are the ones he knows best in the city.
“Le Petit Cambodge (where 18 people were killed on Friday night) is a really well-known restaurant. It’s always busy. People have an affection for it. It’s a really small place as well. I can’t imagine how you would get out of it if you were being shot at.”