hatrickpatrick wrote: » Scariest place I've ever personally been is an area near the Guinness factory late at night, I can't remember which road it was (Basin St, Marrowbone Lane and the School/Summer/Braithewaite Street intersection are all possibilities - I had stumbled drunkenly and phoneless out of a house party on New Earl Street around 4am with the intention of walking home to Dun Laoghaire and promptly gotten lost in an absolute maze of apartment tower blocks ) but there was an all out gang battle going on with young lads throwing sh!t at eachother and setting fire to things. To this day I'm not sure if that was their idea of fun or if there was actual hatred towards eachother but it was feckin' terrifying. The main thing going on was people standing on balconies (open access stairwells so I have no idea if they even lived in the buildings or not - a lot of the apartments were boarded up so possibly scheduled for demolition or a facelift?), setting fire to tennis balls and the like, and then trying to bounce them off the ground and hit people standing on the balconies in opposite buildings. Feckin' mad stuff. Never saw any mention of it in the news which made me wonder if it was a regular occurrence and therefore not newsworthy :eek: It was in and around Arthur's Day, so close enough to Halloween but probably not Halloween related, idk. Autumn does seem to be peak "set everything in sight on fire for the craic" season from September onwards, so that might have been a factor. Wouldn't wander around that stretch at night again in a hurry though. This stuff seemed to be going on across several different streets in the same cluster, all within sight of the Guinness building, so it very much seemed like an organised kind of thing. Do 'gangs' of teenage douchebags still do arranged meetups with the express purpose of having fights? Phone was dead hence no Google maps and no chance to call the Gardai. Eventually after running through several streets for about ten minutes trying to get away from the chaos I miraculously ended up on Cork Street, which I was fully familiar with and could figure out my route home from. Serious way to wake up after a session at which you had just woken up from a drunken slumber On a serious note, it also massively pissed me off that this kind of crap seemed to be going on with total impunity. No sign of any cavalry arriving at least while I was there, which sort of adds weight to the claims that certain areas are just "let go" by the authorities, and therefore these marauding gangs of scumbags can just get away with it without any real retaliation. What always struck me was how tranquil Cork Street was once I arrived on it, if I'd been walking home from a gaff party there that night I wouldn't have had so much as a hint that there was major trouble going on just a five minute walk away. I'd always heard that the city centre was like that, with settled and rough areas directly intersecting with eachother, but this was the most bizarre contrast I've come across in my time. As funny as it it to look back on as a passer-by who just happened to have gotten lost, it was incredibly scary at the time, and I can only imagine that people actually living in the place must have been terrified. With regard to Basin Street, it would gel with a Prime Time documentary I saw a few years later about how a lot of people who live there bolt their doors once the sun goes down and, in one resident's own words, "I don't even want to know what goes on out there until the morning". Seems these lads know that they wreak arson, assault and general antisocial chaos in the neighbourhood and get away with it indefinitely :mad: This was in the Autumn of either 2013 or 2014, so for all I know the place is totally different now. The boarded up apartments nearby would suggest that some kind of revamp was planned for the area.
hatrickpatrick wrote: It was in and around Arthur's Day.
dundalkfc10 wrote: » Where you A. Phoneless? B. Your phone was dead? C. Lying?
Jaysus! The tea! wrote: » Dublin's North Inner City, most of Antrim, parts of Limerick and Cork.
mfceiling wrote: » Most of Antrim? The giants causeway? The holiday towns of Cushendun and Cushendall? The caravan parks favoured by pensioners in Portrush? The leafy housing enclaves off the Lisburn Road? Yeah....a real no go zone all right.
mfceiling wrote: » The leafy housing enclaves off the Lisburn Road?
panda100 wrote: » Is Arthur's Day still a thing?
Limericklaaaad wrote: » Southill in limerick even tho alot of the houses have been knocked its still a kip. You dont go there unless you have reason and if your not known you'd be seen as an easy target, They know all the cars that do be coming and going, Scary place at night, Looks like a war zone gangs of upto 30-40 people cars being rallyed almost every night without fail shootings and stabbings are common place and most things go unreported. Not to mention the caseys halting site the place is a dump avoid at all costs.
cruais wrote: » A confession box
mfceiling wrote: » Most of Antrim? The giants causeway?
MarkY91 wrote: » I'm not saying it's the most dangerous place but it's just a dodgy place I visited at the weekend..... We went to Belfast from Dublin for the weekend. Decided to find a kebab shop on Google Sunday evening to bring back to the hotel for the girlfriend and i. I seen one on a street called hope street. Which was a 1 mile walk down a long street (the one with the Europa hotel). So after I got the kebabs, I decided to take a route home that's behind the main streets for the craic . I ended up in a place called sandy row( a friend I know from Belfast said wtf was I doing there? She wouldn't even drive her car through it) there was a pub on the corner with union jacks and Israel flags hanging from it and a baldy man with half of his face tattood. I knew I was ****ed if they knew I'm from Dublin so I did a fast walk past the dodgy bastards. The pub had music pumping at about 8pm on a Sunday. I ended up walking down sandy row which had union jacks and murals everywhere. Nothing happened and I never felt in danger but I knew quite well to keep my mouth shut.
Strabanimal wrote: » Where you drunk? I don't know about you guys down South, you seem very aloof about things, no real street smarts. If you grow up in tough areas you always have a sixth sense to expect the unexpected, know where you are, always watch your back etc. I'm not even from Belfast but knew from day 1 here to keep my wits about me in regards to where I am. The Royal Bar you're most likely talking about, complete dump but has far more flags than usual because it's a hotspot for the 12th when they put them up.
MarkY91 wrote: » I just decided to go get some take away kebabs to bring back to the hotel then fancied a detour as republican and loyalist murals are really interesting to me. It's weird how 20 second walk off a main road with tourists on it such a loyalist, dodgy area.
MarkY91 wrote: » Minus the loyalist guy with a face tattoo, all I saw was kids playing on their bikes and the odd person strolling home from a local shop. So there was no danger at that particular time.
MarkY91 wrote: » It wasn't until I text a friend saying that sandy row was fairly interesting when i realised how bad it's supposed to be as she was fairly shocked at how I ended up there. (like I said, 29 second walk off the main road that's full of tourists walking to botanical gardens).
MarkY91 wrote: » The gf and I took a stroll up the shankhill road earlier that day on yet another detour and that was grand too.
Tordelback wrote: » Occurs to me though that I have seen physcial violence on the Red Line, in the early evening a few years ago - a young father hitting his 3 or 4 year old son round the head for crying (inspired solution, that :rolleyes:). While the rest of sat there gawping in horror, an elderly lad sitting opposite leaned over and calmly said "stop that right now, you can't do that"; the father turned on him red-faced and shouting about his "rights" until the rest of men the carriage got to our feet and faced him down. He sat their muttering under his breath until he got off at Cheeverstown (true story, before the 'never happened' brigade get started). I think about that poor kid's life a lot, and I wonder how long it will be until we're on here calling him a knacker and a scumbag.
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