Temperatures languished in the high teens in the early hours of Friday September 10, 1982. It was unseasonably warm. While 32 year-old, dark-haired, stocky, Declan Flynn chatted to his friend Leigh Arundale in the Italian owned Fairview Grill, across in the park a gang of local youths – Robert Armstrong, 18; Anthony Maher, 18; Colm Donovan, 17; Patrick Kavanagh, 18 and a 14 year-old minor, who for legal reasons cannot be named – policed the tree-lined pathway parallel to the street. Their self-imposed remit... to rid Fairview Park of queers.
Photographs by Derek Spiers
“ A few of the gang claimed they had bashed “twenty steamers” in the weeks leading up to September 10th. Their first attack on that tragic night failed.