Orla de Bri, a leading sculptor, had been commissioned. Funds were in place and the Butterly family, the owners of the Stardust, had granted permission for a monument to stand where the club once was.
Instead, the idea of a commemorative statue has caused bitter recrimination, exposing the jagged fissures that now divide the families of the bereaved. If erected, each branch would have a heart-shaped leaf inscribed with the name of a dead person, but some members of the Stardust Victims Committee are refusing to allow their relatives’ names to be “exploited” in this way.
“We don’t want anything from the Butterlys. Nineteen of the families are not co-operating,” Eugene Kelly, whose brother Robert died in the fire, said last week.
Fresh calls to open a new inquiry into the disaster have laid bare more schisms in the collective Stardust family. The image of resolute protesters marching outside the Dail, bravely demanding justice after a quarter of a century, was the public face of the campaign last week. But elsewhere others were questioning the wisdom of re-opening old wounds. “What can we hope to achieve from a new inquiry?” asked Jimmy Dunne, father of one of the victims.
Dunne’s 18-year-old son Liam was the 48th person to be killed by the fire, dying on March 11, 1981, from lung failure four weeks after the blaze. “The original tribunal found that Eamon Butterly was negligent,” Dunne said. “It also didn’t rule out that the fire was accidental. It was certainly flawed, but why pick over the same evidence again? How will that help anyone achieve closure?” The Department of Justice, advised by the forensic science laboratory, has said it will take three weeks to decide whether a new investigation is warranted.
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Antoinette Keegan, who lost two sisters in the fire and was herself injured, insists fresh evidence has emerged and the government must act. But is the fresh evidence compelling enough to demand another public inquiry?
AT every St Valentine’s Day commemoration of the fire for the past 25 years, the bereaved have called for a fresh investigation. But this year the campaign got renewed vigour, thanks to a Prime Time programme on television. Doubts were cast on some of the findings of the original tribunal and there were rumours a nightclub was to open on the Stardust site.
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Calls for a new inquiry gathered speed after RTE screened an affecting drama based on the book They Never Came Home, by Neil Fetherstonhaugh and Tony McCullagh. “There was no truth in the speculation that a new club was to open on St Valentine’s night, but it pushed Stardust back on the agenda,” McCullagh said.
The Prime Time programme disputed the tribunal’s assertion that the fire began in seating in an alcove in the west of the nightclub. This theory was flawed, the Stardust committee claimed, because the state’s forensic team used an inaccurate map of the building, one showing a basement store that never existed.
In a submission to the government, the Stardust campaigners echoed Prime Time’s contention that the fire broke out in a storeroom that was packed with a cocktail of flammable detergents, floor wax, table polish, cooking oil, paper plates and plastic cutlery. It was separated from a “lamp room” by only a thin plywood wall. This would explain why eyewitnesses reported seeing “a fireball” on the roof of the building minutes before the alarm was raised, members of the committee insist.
Justice Ronan Keane, the chairman of the original tribunal, dismissed these sightings as unreliable, arguing that many of the eyewitnesses had been drinking and may have confused the sequence of events.
“There are new questions to be answered,” said Tony Gillick, Dublin’s chief fire officer between 1990 and 2002 and a contributor to the Prime Time programme. “The finding of probable arson cast a terrible shadow over the community and, at the very least, that could be ruled out by a fresh investigation. If the eyewitnesses are correct, there are eight minutes missing from the tribunal’s evidence.”
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While Gillick admitted that establishing what happened will be almost impossible 25 years later, he believed an investigative Dail committee could delve deeper than the findings of the tribunal.
Professor Michael Delichatsios from the University of Ulster, one of the world’s leading fire scientists, also contributed to the Prime Time programme, again favouring the storeroom theory. But he didn’t see the need for a new inquiry. “It’s a complex case and nobody can prove if it was arson or negligence. My conclusions were based on assumptions, not hard evidence,” he said.
Dougal Drysdale, a Scottish professor of fire safety engineering who conducted experiments into the combustibility of the products in the storeroom, agreed. “With any catastrophe of such a scale it’s difficult to be dispassionate, but there are currently no grounds to reopen the case. It’s not like a DNA case where new information can come to light decades later,” he said.
So with some of the victims’ families questioning the wisdom of a new inquiry, and two of the committee’s key experts lukewarm about reopening the case, what hope is there of the Department of Justice taking the unprecedented step of reopening a tribunal 25 years after it sat for 122 days and heard from 363 witnesses? “The words ‘public inquiry’ send shivers down the spines of politicians, but we believe the evidence is overwhelming,” said Greg O’Neill, a lawyer acting for the committee. He believed that much of the critical evidence was in the 633-page Keane tribunal report and a new inquiry with strict terms of reference could establish the truth. The mistaken belief that the fire began in the seats left the tribunal with no choice but to presume arson, he said.
O’Neill believed a list of the storeroom’s contents was overlooked because it was only relevant if the fire started in the storeroom. “But if you take the tribunal’s starting point to be incorrect, then this other evidence becomes critical,” he said.
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But how new is this evidence? For 25 years the state’s default position has been that no new investigation will be undertaken unless previously unknown information comes to light. On that basis it is unlikely a new tribunal will be ordered, barring a sensational breakthrough by the committee’s investigative team.
In a letter to Christine Keegan, a member of the Stardust Victims Committee, in July 2003, Bertie Ahern explained the state’s reluctance. After pointing out it would be difficult to reopen the findings of the tribunal in the absence of fresh evidence “which would stand up legally”, the taoiseach drew Keegan’s attention to a recently published bill allowing for “simpler forms of inquiry”.
“You might perhaps raise with the Department of Justice the possibility of the new procedure being used for a further inquiry into the Stardust tragedy if further evidence becomes available,” Ahern wrote.
O’Neill is adamant that a tweaking of existing legislation would allow for a new inquiry. He cited acts which include a clause stating that a minister may direct an inquiry be reopened if satisfied new evidence is available to alter its findings. “I don’t think it would set a precedent or open the floodgates on every inquiry,” he said.
If not new information, could a fresh investigation at least provide closure for the victims’ families? A simple, unqualified apology has still not been provided, Antoinette Keegan said.
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IT is too late now for Patrick Butterly, the bluff, self-made owner of the Stardust to apologise. Before his death four years ago, he published an autobiography, From Radishes to Riches, a self-congratulatory tale of his rise and rise.
The Stardust fire merited four terse paragraphs, concluding that “the only good thing the tribunal did was to prove it was malicious damage and we were not responsible for the deaths of the people there”.
His son, Eamon Butterly, who within two weeks of the Stardust fire was quoted as saying he saw no reason why the complex should not be reopened, was browbeaten into a grudging “sorry” by a journalist in a doorstep interview earlier this year, but has never publicly apologised.
Further compensation for the families is unlikely. In 1985 all 823 claimants reluctantly forfeited their right to sue the state and the Butterlys when they accepted awards of between €1,250 and €25,000 from the tribunal.
So with Stardust higher on the agenda than at any time since the tragedy occurred, the committee is keen to build on the momentum and increase pressure on the government. If it fails to convince the justice department to grant a new inquiry, Antoinette Keegan said she will run as a candidate in Dublin North Central in next year’s general election.
Even if she’s elected, though, she won’t be opening the bronze memorial planned for the site of the Stardust. The branch reserved for her sisters Martina and Mary will remain empty.