AN INDEPENDENT examination has concluded there is no evidence to support a key finding of the tribunal into the 1981 Stardust tragedy that the fire was started deliberately near the ballroom of the nightclub.
Paul Coffey SC, who chaired the examination, says that the principal finding of the 1982 tribunal was open to grave doubt.
It was, he said, a “mere hypothetical explanation for the probable cause of the fire”. The fire on St Valentine’s Night in 1981 claimed 48 lives and injured hundreds of others.
Mr Coffey was asked by the Government last July to examine the case made by the Stardust Victims Committee that a new inquiry should be held into the cause and source of the inferno.
Mr Coffey noted that the original tribunal’s finding, pointing to probable arson, had “provoked anger and indignation among the survivors and the bereaved who perceive it to cast suspicion of criminal wrongdoing over all who attended the Stardust on the night of the fire”.
The independent 74-page report, published yesterday, suggests the Government should consider correcting the public record in this regard, by placing on the record of the Dáil and Seanad an acknowledgment that there is no evidence the fire was started deliberately.
In his conclusions, however, Mr Coffey asks if any useful purpose would be served by a new inquiry seeking to establish the true cause of the fire, one of the principal demands of the victims’ committee.
The 1982 tribunal pointed to the fire starting in the west alcove of the main ballroom, but expert evidence produced on behalf of the committee since then suggested that the source of the fire was in the roof space.
Its members have campaigned for the opening of a new inquiry to investigate such a possibility. However, Mr Coffey concluded such an inquiry would at best produce a hypothetical finding capable of being neither proved nor disproved.
“It seems to me that, at a remove of nearly three decades from the date of the fire and in the absence of any identified evidence which can establish the cause of the fire, the public interest would not be served in establishing a further inquiry solely for that purpose,” he stated.
One theory suggested by the committee is that the fire originated in the lamp room upstairs. Mr Coffey said that this scenario was implausible given that one of the doormen had given credible evidence to the original tribunal that he went to the lamp room to turn up the lights in the ballroom having already witnessed the fire in the west alcove.
In relation to the 1982 finding of probable arson, Mr Coffey stated: “The tribunal’s finding of fact that the fire was probably started deliberately gives rise to evidential and logical difficulties. Its evidential basis must be open to grave doubt . . . It is arguably inconsistent with its earlier finding . . . that the cause of the fire is not known and may never be known.”
