Families of five young victims of the Stardust fire still don't know exactly where their children are buried, writes Kathy Sheridan
By today's standards, they were children. Of the 48 who died, half were aged 18 or under. Four were only 16; eight were 17. Only a handful were over 21. All but a few were from the closely knit, working-class, north Dublin areas of Donnycarney, Artane, Bonnybrook and Coolock. Yet, in an area with 40 per cent unemployment, some had managed to get jobs and were making a vital contribution to the household budget.
Some, like Richard Bennett, had become the main breadwinners. Richard was only 17, but, says his mother Helen, "he was the leader of the pack, the son, the daddy, the father of the house. He told the others in the most positive way when to go out and when to come in and to do what their Mammy says." Ironically, he had a job installing fire extinguishers.
Liam Dunne was 18, cheeky, full of fun and working as a butcher in Superquinn. "He had ambitions," says his father Jimmy. "He was going to night school. He had his sights on being a manager."
Michael Ffrench too was 18, and was due to start working with an auto electrician the following Monday. He was a near neighbour of the Dunnes and there is a happy Christmas photograph of him, forever young and good-looking, in the Dunnes' livingroom, with an arm playfully around Liam's mother, Kay.
They were among the 841 young people at the Stardust for the big St Valentine's eve disco in 1981, the girls with their flicked-back hair and shiny blouses, the boys with their sharp suits and John Travolta moves.
Alcohol was freely available. Eamon Butterly, general manager and one of the owners, had applied for and got a Special Exemption Order, allowing him to serve alcohol between 11pm and 2am that night. The "special" exemption referred to in his application was for a house dinner dance; his interpretation of "dinner dance" as a plate of sausages and chips for the £3 disco admission charge was hardly unusual back then.
But it would feature in the findings of the Keane Tribunal, which would note that the Stardust was selling intoxicating liquor that night "without being duly licensed to sell", that liquor was sold "to a number of persons under the age of 18" by people "under 18 years of age". Anyone who does any of these, it stated, "should be guilty of an offence".
At around 1.30am, the winners of the night's disco-dancing contest were giving a demonstration on the main stage, when some of those watching noticed a small fire which had started on seats in a closed-off area. Some thought it was dry ice.
By 1.41am, the flames had spread to other seats. Within three minutes, the flames had climbed to ceiling level in the alcove and the false ceiling collapsed. Fire roared up the carpet-tiled walls, spreading to the main ballroom, filling it with thick, viscous black smoke as the ceiling tiles seemed to "explode". At 1.45am the ceiling collapsed in a toxic, molten mass and the lights failed.
The flames raced across the floor, fuelled by polyurethane-stuffed seats - which, alight, can raise room temperatures to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a minute - and plywood tables covered in red plastic.
By 1.46 most of the people had headed for the main door. Those who sensibly made for one of the five emergency exits would pay dearly for that decision. One of those doors was chained and padlocked. Two were obstructed by skips or tables or, in one case, the DJ's van. Others appeared to be locked because chains had been draped across the push-bars. This had been done on Eamon Butterly's orders, to discourage people inside from letting their friends in. By now, there was complete panic, as frantic teenagers heaved against the chained doors, their blackened hands clawing at the fresh air through tiny openings.
By 1.49, the ballroom was an inferno. Those who tried to escape through the toilet windows were confronted with a steel trap. The windows, on the orders of Eamon Butterly, had been sealed with metal grilles and steel plates. Repeated attempts by people outside to remove the plates using sledgehammers, axes, and tow-ropes attached to cars failed to move them. The dying screams of the young that night still feature in many nightmares.
When the first fire engine arrived at 1.51, firemen found bodies stacked on top of each other inside the doors, only inches from safety. In the eight minutes since a barman called 999, 46 young people had been killed and 214 injured. Later, two more would die of their injuries, including the cheeky butcher, 18-year-old Liam Dunne and the girl he was "chasing" that night, 17-year-old Donna Mahon. Liam would live for a month, his lungs destroyed, communicating with his family by moving his eyebrows. He died on March 11th, officially the last victim of the Stardust.
His parents, Jimmy and Kay, acutely aware that grief and bitterness can feed upon themselves, strive hard to be positive. "It gave us a great period of readjustment . . . At least we'd talked to him right to the end," says Jimmy, more conscious than most that it could have been otherwise. "Do you know we're the only ones who are positive that our own child is in the grave?"
Michael Ffrench, the 18-year-old whose picture still has an honoured place in the Dunnes' home, also died in the Stardust disaster but his resting place is by no means certain. His parents, Mick and Peg, did not make the anguished trawl of the hospitals looking for him because Michael was on no list of the dead or injured. Forensic detectives came and tried to take fingerprints from books he used at home but to no avail.
"The only thing they ever came back with was a key to the front door," recalls Mick. "I remember it worked in the door but where they found it I don't know. Was it in his pocket? I thought someone said it was under bodies . . ." He thinks his memory is going - or that he may have blocked certain things out. He remembers eight hearses bearing eight coffins of unidentified remains (three would be identified soon after) leaving the church for St Fintan's cemetery on Monday, February 23rd, 10 days after the disaster.
"There was no name on any of them. I remember there were seven or eight cars in front between ours and the eight hearses. We got to the cemetery, our car got inside the gate and I had to try and almost carry Peg to where I thought the grave was. I was like a bulldozer but the crowd was too big. I never got near that grave . . . I think it was a few days after the funeral that someone told Fr Cantwell that Michael was in plot 6."
Helen Bennett never made it to the graveside on that day either. Richard, her cherished eldest child, was in one of those eight, unnamed coffins but she felt unable to go to the burial: "I pulled into one of the roads before the cemetery. I don't think I'd have been able to cope," she says in a soft midlands accent.
"They said they had a thumb of Richard's. But I don't think they could match the fingerprint. They came and fingerprinted the flat [ in Coolock] and asked did I want the eight buried in the one grave. I said 'No'. You had to keep dealing with the police, hoping maybe that he had just got a bang in the head and would come in . . ."
She had been assured that it was "99.9 per cent certain" that the body in plot 1 in St Fintan's was Richard's. But to this day, there has been no confirmation of death.
The "Stardust plot" with its five separate graves - purportedly bearing the remains of Richard Bennett, Michael Ffrench, Murtagh Kavanagh, Eamon Loughman and Paul Wade - bears no names but for that of Paul Wade, carved on a tombstone with his mother's. Paul Wade's father has also died.
Four years ago, Helen Bennett and Mick and Peg Ffrench, driven mad by the uncertainty surrounding their sons' graves and encouraged by stories of DNA identification of long-buried bodies, began to push for exhumation and analysis. They wrote repeatedly to a chain of senior politicians, and saw their inquiry passedfrom one to another until they received a letter from Dr Brian Farrell, the Dublin City coroner.
This confirmed that he had examined the files from February 14th, 1981: ". . . Body 41, said to be that of Richard Bennett . . . The file is labelled 'unidentified male, B41, probably Bennett'. The conclusion is that the body is probably that of Richard Bennett but there is no reason given for this assumption."
So why was Helen Bennett told that it was "99.9 per cent certain" that the body in plot 1 was Richard's? And if this was the case, why did its exhumation depend on the signed agreement of the other five families, when the bodies were supposedly, in Helen's words, in separate graves? Whatever the reason, according to Bennett, the remaining four families are in agreement about exhumation so there seems no excuse now for any delay.
Since reading that DNA analysis depends on bone marrow and that the bones may have "exploded" in the fire, destroying the marrow, Mick Ffrench is realistic about the prospects of having his child's remains identified. What they cannot understand is why the authorities will not simply make the effort.
When Helen Bennett visits the Stardust plot now, she goes to all four graves - "you're thinking, maybe he's here, or maybe he's there, so you go to each of them and you spend a little extra time at the one they said was '99.9 per cent'."
She never uses the word "d-i-e-d", as she puts it, about Richard; he is "lost" or "gone". She has not been able to look at a photograph of him for 25 years, but she accepts, she says, that he is "lost".
"If he was identified, I'd be very, very, very happy . . . And I swear I'll sit outside Dáil Éireann for as long as it takes," she says, a shy woman but a steely one when it comes to her children. "I'm not going to let them go another year."
For others of the bereaved and injured, even 25 years on, "closure" can only come in the form of establishing liability for their terrible loss. For them, the Stardust disaster has left too many issues unresolved, too many unanswered questions, for their children to rest in peace.
A recurring regret for many is that they waived the right to make further claims against any defendants (including the Butterlys), in return for State compensation. Despite Mr Justice Ronan Keane's stunning indictment of named authorities and individuals, no-one has been called to account for a tragedy that will resonate through several generations; no-one has spent one day in jail.
There remains absolute bewilderment at Mr Justice Keane's finding that the cause of the fire was "in all probability, arson", the finding that enabled the Butterlys to bring a claim for malicious damages against the State and to win over £580,000.
The families know, because the same tribunal said so, that there was no evidence either of an accidental or deliberate starting of the fire. So how was this finding arrived at, they ask? Even Jimmy and Kay Dunne, who have reconciled themselves to their terrible loss, strongly believe that someone should be charged with negligence at least.
"We're still living with the thought that something is wrong somewhere. What's needed is the political will to do something about it."
For several weeks, the families have been bracing themselves for the anniversary. At the annual Mass, which takes place tomorrow at 12.30pm in St Joseph's Church on Greencastle Road, a candle will be lit for each of the 48 dead and 48 white birds released. It has been reported that all Government Ministers and politicians have been told to stay away.
The problem is that those same politicians are the families' only hope.