Wexford woke up to the Monday aftershock of the Tuskar air crash. The day before, as the notes and interviews of the investigators would record, Wexford had gone about its usual Sunday routine. Getting Mass. Getting the dinner. Getting to the match.

On the lunchtime radio news, it was reported an Aer Lingus plane was missing. As the accident investigation report would later show, on the basis of the flight path and speed of the St Phelim before it abruptly lost contact, it was reckoned the last position of the lost plane was closer to the Welsh coast. Which is where the initial search took place.

Lifeboats from Rosslare Harbour and Kilmore Quay were called into action. The late Cecil Miller, local RNLI honorary secretary and familiar figure in sailing circles, was at the heart of the action, and from Castlebridge where he had developed an airfield, another sailing enthusiast, John O'Loughlin, known locally as "the flying farmer", was in the air and helping in the search for the downed aircraft.

No one actually saw the stricken plane. People in the village of Broadway would later report hearing a sound like thunder. One stroller would recall a sound like stones rolling over a rock, and along the coast around Fethard-on-Sea, Duncannon and the rocky Hook Head, curious onlookers would later tell of seeing something with fiery wings but bright orange in colour which made a droning sound in the air before falling into the sea where it floated within sight for some time.

For the vast majority of people in Wexford the tragedy of the lost Aer Lingus flight was something happening somewhere else. For Wexford, the start of the Tuskar air disaster and the mystery that would linger for more than 30 years went unnoticed that day.

The shock came home to Wexford with the headlines of the morning newspapers. Anne Kelly was among the dead. Born in Dublin but reared in Wexford where she lived with doting grandparents, she had only joined Aer Lingus the previous year as an air hostess. She had won her way into the hearts of the people of Wexford as a tiny solo dancer of the cancan when performing in the annual concert by Miss Kavanagh's Dancing School at the Theatre Royal.

The Viscount crash would bring another shock wave later in the day. Sitting beside the late Eddie O'Keeffe of the rival Wexford People and the late Tomas O Duinn, then of the Enniscorthy People, on the press bench of the Monday County Council meeting, someone came in with the message that the first bodies from the air disaster had been found and were on their way to Rosslare Harbour.

Communications and transport were different then. Those were the days of handcranked telephone sets and connections through the local exchange to two digit numbers. Few of us had cars. Brendan Furlong, a colleague on the Free Press, a family-owned newspaper in Wexford, drove me to Rosslare Harbour.

Rosslare Harbour was different then. A bleak, wind-swept place with a rail line connected to a dull station pointing out to what was known as "the pier head". The unusual sight of the British navy frigate - an unusual sight - which came in to dock in a dull numbed silence. A priest was at the dockside to receive the bodies and among the recovered remains were those of Anne Kelly.

Suddenly Wexford was at the centre of a worldwide story of tragedy and mystery. Griffin's Hotel became the nerve centre as media from Ireland and Britain gathered. In Wexford town the hotels were also buzzing. Building up the reputation which would anchor his own family hotel group later on was Paddy Fitzpatrick, then managing director of the Talbot Hotel. Many of the press and figures from the transportation and aviation administrations of Ireland and Britain gathered here for what was code-named "Operation Tuskar".

It was Talbot catering staff who brought the orders of food up to the emergency morgue at St Michael's Club opposite the Christian Brothers' school where the autopsies took place. Those trusted to deliver the food would be quizzed for ghoulish details of what they saw. The pained and strained strangers who sat in lonely loss at the inquests looked broken and numbed.

As the days turned into weeks, Leo Carthy would pace around the reporters' room at the Free Press and say again and again: "They're searching in the wrong place. Billy Bates says they're searching in the wrong place." Leo was right because trawler skipper Billy Bates was right. And Billy Bates proved it by finding the wreck of the Viscount St Phelim, almost three months after the biggest disaster in Irish aviation history, which remains unexplained and has prompted another investigation 32 years on.

Dermot Walsh was a reporter on the Wexford Free Press newspaper at the time of the crash. Today, he lives in Limerick and is the author of the 1983 Mercier best-seller Tragedy at Tuskar Rock