“Thanks be to God we’ve got justice,” Bridget McDermott said yesterday after a jury found that the 48 people who perished in the Stardust fire in 1981 were unlawfully killed.
Mrs McDermott lost three of her children, William, George, and Marcella in the fire. “I miss them so much she said, “but at least we have done something for them today”.
Her impressive dignity and courage in the face of such unspeakable loss is truly extraordinary. But no-one should have to wait 43 years for the truth to be told about a travesty where 48 young people lost their lives.
The raw emotion seen from the families and survivors yesterday, with people both sobbing and cheering, was indicative of the release of a tremendous additional burden: the heavy cost of having to fight so hard for the justice that was denied them.
“I can pray and ask God to spare me ‘til it’s all over.
“All I want is justice.”
The #Stardust disaster cost Bridget McDermott three children, and later her marriage too.
She spoke to @ZaraKing about what the last 43 years have taken out of her.pic.twitter.com/XcKvHzTkqn
— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) April 18, 2024
It is almost impossible without justice to achieve closure: to recover after death and loss in these most tragic of circumstances if truth is denied. For the Stardust families, the finding of the Keane tribunal in 1981 (which is now struck from the record), that the deadly blaze was caused by ‘probable arson’, must have felt like a knife to the heart for a traumatised people already dealing with the open wounds of incomprehension, loss, and pain.
Maurice Fraser’s sister Thelma died in the Stardust. The Keane finding felt like a smear, he said at the press conference after the conclusion of the current inquests were read out. He described the deaths as causing unbearable pain for those who lost parents, siblings, and cherished friends.
He added that, for decades, the hearts and minds of those who sought justice were “shattered” and that the “mental toll was overwhelming exhausting” as they persisted for “day after weary day” to get to the truth.
For 28 years the names of their loved ones “were smeared with the label of arson, one of the most despicable crimes imaginable”, he said.
That’s a profound insight into the tremendous cost that is paid by those who struggle against great odds to seek justice, because the strain and the hardship and the need for dogged persistence despite the life-altering sorrow is a weight not easily borne.
It was made all the harder by the fact that victims were mostly from ordinary families, living in working-class areas, without the kind of legal connections or access to the corridors of power that might have helped their cause.
Bridget McDermott, speaking to Zara King in the deeply-moving interview above, said that the families had to go canvassing to raise the money to pay solicitors to push for the truth.
Imagine that: imagine burying your three beloved children, and then seeing an inquiry smear them with an arson charge, and then, amidst that heartbreak, having to ask strangers for what they could spare to help fund your never-ending, decades-long battle for the truth.
“The public couldn’t have been nicer to us, they were very good, they helped us immensely everywhere we went, and I thank them for that,” she said. But she should have never been put in that position.
Justice is not really blind. Already disadvantaged people cannot access justice in the way that others can. In a country coming down with NGOs ready to spring into action for every perceived slight, it seems extraordinary that none exist to help people like the Stardust families who had to fight this long, lonely battle without that kind of help.
Yesterday, the jury found that the fire had been caused by an electrical fault. They also confirmed that some of the exits from the building had been locked – a claim that had been denied. The stories heard by the inquests for the past year were deeply harrowing.
800 people were packed into the Stardust. From when the first flame was spotted, it took just 8 minutes for the entire ballroom to catch fire.
The fact that the bereaved had to fight for four decades forced them to relive again and again their understanding of the chaos and the screaming and the terror – the frantic attempts at escape; the people who survived but left burned and scarred and injured; the frantic families who desperately looked for their children in the hospitals and in the morgues.
Noel Keegan, a fire officer who was then 30 years old told the inquests that he had carried bodies “burnt to a cinder” and “still on fire” from the Stardust. Parents had to try to identify their children’s burned bodies. Some of the charred dead were found locked in a last terrified embrace, their bodies left fused together.
How can that ever be forgotten, and how does the mind cope with such horror? Liam Dunne’s sister, Siobhán Kearney, said that her brother Alan remained “traumatised ever since” by what he saw that night. She said that her brother, who lived for 25 days after the fire with horrific burns, told that her ‘hands were melting’ and he couldn’t get out the door as the inferno raged around them.
They were all so young too. Half of those who died were aged 18 or under, most from Coolock, Artane and Edenmore, or from areas across the river like Ringsend.
I remember my friends’ older sisters at that time getting ready for similar discos: the heady excitement of getting ready in a gang, squashed into one bedroom, sharing eyeliner, comparing lipsticks, hairspray everywhere. The palpable feeling of being young and full of expectation – your whole life ahead of you. But for those who went to the Stardust, 48 never came home.
Many of their families will not have lived to see this hard-fought victory after four long, drawn-out decades of being denied justice. That delay is inexcusable.
Just as with the Cervical Check scandal, and the Hepatitis C scandal, the state often seems either overly combative or curiously indifferent to those who have had travesty visited upon them through no fault of their own.
Gertrude Barrett, whose son Michael, 17, went with so many others went to the Stardust that night, said she spent four days in the City Morgue waiting to have him identified.
She told the Irish Sun: “I know how my son died. He was in a building that went on fire, he couldn’t get out of it, but I want to know why he couldn’t get out. I want questions answered. That’s why I’ve been on a mission and when you’re driven by desire there ain’t any boundaries.”
“I knew before I left the City Morgue what I’d have to do for my son.”
“I knew exactly what I was taking on — the Irish State — because my child was not leaving the earth like that. I could feel it in the air, the contempt, the disdain. Everything about it, I was breathing it in.”
Her courage and determination and forbearance, like that of so many who fought alongside her, is both inspiring and heartbreaking – heartbreaking because no-one should spend 43 years fighting and fighting and fighting to know the truth about how her 17-year old boy died.
“I said to Jimmy [her husband] when this happened : ‘we have to get justice’,” Bridget McDermott remembered. “He said ‘No, we can’t do that. We haven’t the money anyway.” She said the Stardust not only took her children, but her marriage as well.
No Irish person should ever be in the position where they cannot access justice because they haven’t the money to seek it. No Irish parent, already grieving and dealing with horrendous trauma, should feel the State treats them with contempt because they want to know the truth about how their child was unlawfully killed.
The apology now being sought from the State by the Stardust families should be given without delay. But the other lesson for the State is that it needs to do more to ensure that those without resources who are fighting for truth and justice should be given the help they need and they deserve.
In alphabetical order, those who were killed unlawfully in the Stardust were: Michael Barrett (17), Richard Bennett (17), Carol Bissett (18), James Buckley (23), Paula Byrne (19), Caroline Carey (17), John Colgan (21), Jacqueline Croker (18), Liam Dunne (18), Michael Farrell (26), David Flood (18), Thelma Frazer (20), Michael Ffrench (18), Josephine Glen (16), Michael Griffiths (18), Robert Hillick (20), Brian Hobbs (21), Eugene Hogan (24), Murtagh Kavanagh (27), Martina Keegan (16), Mary Keegan (19), Robert Kelly (17), Marie Kennedy (17), Mary Kenny (19), Margaret Kiernan (18), Sandra Lawless (18), Francis Lawlor (25), Maureen Lawlor (23), Paula Lewis (19), Eamon Loughman (18), Donna Mahon (17), Helena Mangan (22), George McDermott (18), William McDermott (22), Marcella McDermott (16), Julie McDonnell (20), Teresa McDonnell (16), Gerard McGrath (21), Caroline McHugh (17), James Millar (21), Susan Morgan (19), David Morton (19), Kathleen Muldoon (19), George O’Connor (17), Brendan O’Meara (23), John Stout (18), Margaret Thornton (19) and Paul Wade (17).