Desmond Walls was building a boat at his home in Glounthaune, near Cork city, in the days before he left to catch Aer Lingus Flight 712 from Cork Airport to London on March 24th, 1968. The plane crashed near Tuskar Rock off the Co Wexford coast with all 61 people on board killed.
“He loved nothing more than to take off his suit when he got home from work. He would throw on an old jumper and go to work with his hands,” said Desmond’s son, Dezy, one of nine of his surviving 11 children who gathered this week to commemorate the centenary of their father’s birth.
Ranging in age from 56 to 75, the children, who moved with their mother to Dublin after the tragedy, gathered – at the invitation of the current owners – in the large house that is no longer the family home, joined by relatives, including grandchildren.
Walls died in Ireland’s worst aviation disaster when the Viscount plane crashed into the sea near Tuskar Rock. His body was never found and the cause has never been properly explained in the eyes of many.
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Dublin-born Walls, who was just 44 years old when he died, had a degree in science and worked as operations manager at the Whitegate Oil Refinery in Co Cork. He was and is, in the eyes of his children, something of a Renaissance man.
Eileen Gill is the seventh member of the family. Aged just 10 when the crash happened, she went “numb” on hearing the news. “I went into denial when Daddy died. I didn’t cry until I was 13.” It was hard for her to get closure.
“It was like a mystery. I kept dreaming that he would come home until, eventually, I realised he wasn’t coming back,” said Eileen, who, at the gathering, read from an as yet unpublished memoir she has written, entitled Tuskar Echoes.
In it, she recalls how her father would bring each of his children to London, one at a time, to enjoy quality time with him away from the big brood. After Gill’s turn had come, her father asked her to pick out the best bit. It was, she said, the aeroplane and the journey to London.
“It was like magic,” said Gill, who was nine years old at the time.
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Little did she know that within a year, her beloved father would not survive making that same journey from Cork to Heathrow.
The findings of an international investigation into the Tuskar Rock air crash after 34 years blamed the crash on the likelihood of a fault in the aircraft.
“I believe that. I know some of my siblings don’t,” says Eileen.
Throughout the gathering, the Walls children savoured memories of their father and childhoods, remembering the swimming pool and the tennis court that he built in the spacious garden of their Glounthaune home. Both no longer exist.
“He also liked fishing, hiking, playing football with us in the garden. He read constantly and was very philosophical,” said Dezy, remembering, too, his father’s love of music and poetry.
His son wanted a career in the arts, though this was a bone of contention between the two. The last time they met they rowed about Dezy’s socialising.
“But, we had many good discussions so I don’t like to focus on that final one,” he said. “I believed I could be a musician and entertainer and I think I, eventually, proved that but it took me a long time. Even though it was my father who taught me to play the piano, he never saw the possibility of doing it professionally. He wanted me to study mathematics. I did it for a year but never finished my degree.”