A blast from the past

Turners Cross, Cork €220,000

Going a bomb — that’s the viewings at the femininely-titled home called Avril, a Cork city pad complete with its very own air raid or bomb shelter in the back garden.

We sometimes use the work ‘bombproof’ to describe something that’s incredibly well-built, but the late Cork house builder John Hornibrook was taking no chances with his own family at home, as WW2 war clouds scudded across the British Isles. Ireland might have been neutral, but after all, a few stray bombs did fall in Dublin, Campile and Dundalk in 1940/41, so, better to take no chances with Mr Hitler and the Luftwaffe in the Rebel City.