A feud between two neighbours appears to have sparked Saturday's shooting during a Communion Mass in Ballymun. The background to the shooting of Larry O'Toole and his son Lar seems to be written on the walls outside Lar O'Toole's Ballymun flat.
"No hash in here. Never was" is written in blue paint on the walls leading to the flat Mr O'Toole shares with his girlfriend, Catherine Joyce, and four children.
A family friend said Lar had painted the slogans on the walls, but Ms Joyce said yesterday it had been one of their neighbours.
"People used to call to our flat at three and four in the morning looking for drugs and we'd have to shout out that it was the wrong flat."
Other arrows and directions are painted on the landings and stairwells directing people to another home in the flats complex. The alleged drug-dealer lives there with his girlfriend and six-year-old daughter.
The two families knew each other well, Ms Joyce said. Their four-year-old daughter played with his daughter. "His girlfriend bought everything for the baby when my youngest was born. That's how close we were," Ms Joyce said.
Larry O'Toole said yesterday he had spoken to his son's neighbour once, about four weeks ago. "I just told him it was unacceptable to be having that kind of impact on the families around him. That was the only dealings I had with him, until yesterday. I didn't threaten him or anything."
Ms Joyce said the neighbour often wore military combat clothing and had a large collection of books about weapons.
On Saturday afternoon gardai and caretakers cut through an iron security gate to get into the man's flat. Children's toys were stacked on top of cupboards in the doorway of the dark interior.
The man was known to gardai, but was not considered to be a major drug dealer. "He'd be way down the scale of the local selling of hash," a Garda source said.
He was wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses and a knapsack when he walked into St Joseph's Church on Saturday morning. There was a change of clothes in the bag and he is believed to have been carrying two knives along with the automatic pistol.
Gardai were examining the roof of the church yesterday to determine how many bullets had been fired into it.
On Saturday Lar O'Toole's daughter, Louise (4), was playing in the sunshine outside the block of flats when another child ran up and said her father had been shot dead. She was hysterical. His other daughter, Laura (8), was making her first Communion and Gavin (10), one of his two sons, was in the choir in the church when the shooting happened.
Laura O'Toole played in the corridor of the Mater Hospital yesterday, still wearing her gold-trimmed Communion outfit and carrying the matching umbrella. "She says she's never going in the church again," Ms Joyce said.
"When Lar saw her this morning he started crying," Ms Joyce said. He was in a lot of pain, with a bullet lodged in his chest underneath his heart and a head wound, she said. Her four-year-old daughter kept asking her if the gunman was going to come back.
"She doesn't even want to live in Ballymun any more."
The man was under armed guard in Beaumont Hospital last night. Gardai were waiting for doctors treating him for a fractured skull to say when he could be interviewed.
