The mystery of the falling windows on Bishop Street

Gardaí had cordoned off the street for a bit a couple of days earlier so that contractors could sweep up.

And on Tuesday morning, there were still shards of glass in the grooves of the footpath outside the Boat House office block on Bishop Street.

“We hear it and then we see the mess,” said Michael Eustace, who lives in the Bishop Street flats next door to the office tower. “We don’t actually see it happening.”

Residents and regulars to the area say that windows from the Boat House often smash to the ground, it’s been happening for months. It worries them, they say.

“I’ve said, it’ll happen one time, it’ll kill someone,” said Eustace.

Alex Staskunas, a property manager at Bannon, which looks after the building, said that the windows are being smashed regularly.

“We think they’re shooting with a sling,” he says. “We found metal ball-bearings everywhere.”

This week

On Tuesday, there were five windows boarded up on different storeys of the tall corner tower.

Staskunas, the property manager at Bannon, said that they think it is kids breaking the windows.

It’s been an issue since late 2023, he said. “Close to 20 incidents.”

They put up more CCTV on the building, he said, and caught sight of a group of teenagers hanging around last time that it happened.

But gardaí need more concrete evidence, he said.

Bannon would need to plaster the area in CCTV to be sure to see who is responsible, said Staskunas. “We’re kind of stuck.”

Gardaí promised extra patrols, he said, and it got a bit better for a while. But has started up again, he said.

The Garda Press Office directed questions to the building manager and to Dublin City Council.

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that Gardaí called the council’s Dangerous Building Section to go down on Saturday “to an incident of ‘glass falling’ into the public street”.

An inspector went down and saw that the guards had blocked off the street, and that a contractor for the property managers was cleaning up the shattered outer pane of the glass panel.

“No further works” were warranted at that time, the spokesperson said.

The Dangerous Buildings Section had been called out to a similar incident on 29 April last year too, they said. Contractors for the property managers dealt with it that time too, they said.

Staskunas said Bannon is worried too about glass falling on those below. And a contractor out for a smoke almost got hit by a ball-bearing once, he says.

Brendan Dowling, chairperson of the South Area Youth Service (SAYS), said he hadn’t heard anything about the Boat House or broken windows.

There have been difficulties in the wider south inner-city recently, he said.

A spot near St Stephen’s Green had become something of a shrine and meeting place for teenagers, and also a base for drug dealing, he said.

Young people came into the city from all over, he said.

That can lead to challenges once teenagers are hanging about away from their daily networks, he said. “There’s no social pressure.”

Gardaí have tried to break the pattern with patrols, he said.

But once young people leave their own area, you’ve already lost the battle in a way, he says.

SAYS wouldn’t have the relationships built to be able to work with kids from further afield, he said. “The job is to keep them engaged in their areas.”