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FEBRUARY IS A month that Linda Bishop never enjoys.
“The minute the calendar flips, you know it’s going to be a bad month,” she says this week. “Once the month goes into February, you already start feeling the niggles. You see the advertisements for Valentine’s Day. It all builds up to that day.”
Errol Buckley says it’s one of those big events in the year. A milestone. Like Christmas and Easter. When the month comes around again, it brings him right back. He still has vivid memories of what happened.
For Antoinette Keegan, it’s something that’s always on her mind. “I can remember it like it was yesterday, really I do,” she says. “It’s always there.”
As the clock struck midnight to start Valentine’s Day 40 years ago, Linda was having a great time.
She’d turned 18 in the January and was out with her friends. Having a few drinks and a dance in a club. There were hundreds of people there.
Linda knew a lot of them. There were people she knew from school. People from her workplace nearby.
“We all met up at about eight or nine o’clock,” she previously told the Stardust podcast. “We’d meet in the Silver Swan pub next door. Have a few drinks in there. Then you’d go out – and the bouncers were quite strict – if there was a gang of fellas, they wouldn’t let them in.
“We’d meet fellas from work or from the area and they’d say ‘will you walk in with me’. Now we’d do it for fellas we knew. Pretend we were a couple so they’d get let in. And then they’d go off with their friends and we’d go off with ours.”
Linda remembers meeting a girl she’d known from school in the queue that night. Sandra Lawless. They chatted a good bit on the way in. Sandra was there with her good friend Paula Lewis. Sandra and Paula both died in the fire.
Errol Buckley had gotten there a bit early that evening. He was nervous, but also excited.
He’d reached the final of the disco dancing competition that was taking place that night. His brothers Albert and Jimmy were with him to cheer him on.
“We were all in the house,” he told us previously. “We’d have one or two beers. You had to be early that night, signing people in for the competition. You could see the crowd gathering then that night. The disco didn’t start till about half 12 and then we were out on the floor giving it loads.”
Errol was a fine dancer in his day and swept to victory. He and his brothers were delighted. In the chaos that followed, he became separated from them.
“We were running to all the doors asking ‘have you seen Jimmy?’, Errol said. “People would say ‘he was in looking for you’.”
Jimmy Buckley also died in the Stardust fire.
“It’s something that’s always there,” Errol says now looking back. “It’s like a Christmas – that big event in the year that always comes up. It all comes back to you.
“I go the graveyard on the anniversary every year. My brother is there. And his friends. And their friends. All buried in the same graveyard. You see people that day you bump into on the anniversary every year. You ask how they’re getting on that. It doesn’t feel like it’s been 40 years.”
In all, 48 people lost their lives in the Stardust fire – one of the worst disasters in modern Irish history. It happened in the nightclub in north Dublin just after the conclusion of the disco dancing competition. Today is the 40th anniversary.
The ages of the deceased ranged from 16 to 28. The average age was just 19.5 years old.
There were young married couples among the dead. Others were engaged to be married. There were factory workers, carpenters, painters, receptionists, shop assistants, students.
Two brothers and their sister died. Another two sisters from the same family died. Parents lost their only child.
The majority of them were from the same general areas. The likes of Artane, Coolock, Beaumont, Edenmore. Working class north Dublin. It sent ripples across the community. It wasn’t just those who’d lost family members. People had lost friends. Girlfriends, boyfriends. They lost colleagues.
Over 200 people there that night were injured, some seriously. They still bear the scars of what happened that night. Those who were uninjured also live with scars from their experience.
Even during the grim times we’re living through now, it’s an unfathomable loss of life among people so young.
Funerals
Errol says that talking about what happened to him and the hundreds of others who were that night recently has helped to fully remember the subsequent events after the fire.
“I didn’t know what I’d done the day of my brother’s funeral,” he says. “I was in shock at the time. But when you’re asked about it, when you talk about it, things click back into place. I know what I did after my brother’s funeral. I went to another funeral.”
There were so many funerals. One after the other. Speaking to the Stardust podcast, RTÉ broadcaster Charlie Bird said there’d been five and six funerals a day.
“It’s so hard to get your head around it,” he said.
Photojournalist Eamonn Farrell said: “I think one of the pictures I took shows 13 hearses lined up outside the church in Kilmore. And then I remember when I was in the graveyard there were about five funerals taking place at the same time.”
The Stardust fire was a tragedy on a grand scale. And, even 40 years on, it’s a tragedy for which the book cannot yet be closed. It’s not over yet. It won’t be for so many. Not until the conclusion of the new inquests at the very earliest.
40 years on
Antoinette Keegan went to the Stardust with her sisters Mary and Martina. Antoinette was badly injured in the fire, spending several weeks in hospital. Mary Keegan and Martina Keegan died.
“It still feels like yesterday,” she says. “I don’t know how my ma and da did it. I remember them coming to see me in hospital. They’d change from their black clothes into normal clothes to come see me. The doctors said I shouldn’t be told what’d happened until I’d gotten better.
“They told me Mary and Martina were in hospital, and they were grand. They’d buried them on 18 February. I don’t know how they did it. I wouldn’t be able to do it. I could never walk in [my mother's] shoes. She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever known.”
Antoinette’s father John was one of those who spearheaded the committee representing the families of victims in the aftermath of the fire. He died only a few years after Stardust.
In recent decades, his wife Christine took on the charge and helped to lead the charge for further inquiries into the cause of the fire.
In an interview with RTÉ in 1987, Christine Keegan was asked if it was over for her after the findings of a Tribunal which granted compensation to victims.
She said: “It’ll never be over. That memory will be in that house as long as I’m there. I’d like to open the door and let my two children walk in and have my husband beside me, but that’ll never happen. The Stardust took the three of them.”
New inquests
After a string of attempts over the years to get the government to grant the kind of new substantive inquiries into the fire they wanted, Stardust campaigners finally succeeded in 2019.
In recent years, the efforts had seen the campaigners march to the Dáil with hundreds of supporters. Across the country, they managed to get 48,000 postcards signed calling for new inquiries. Their legal team put forth strong arguments that it was in the public interests for fresh inquests.
All of the protests, the petitions, the press conferences – it eventually led to the Attorney General granting new inquests into each of the 48 deaths which occurred in the Stardust fire.
The Attorney General ruled in September 2019 that there was “insufficiency of inquiry” as to how the original inquests into the 48 deaths were conducted.
After a Covid-ravaged 12 months, it is expected that the inquests will get under way later this year at the RDS in Dublin.
Unfortunately, a delay from the Department of Justice in paying legal costs for counsel representing families of the victims could mean it doesn’t get under way until the summer at the earliest. For this to emerge on the 40th anniversary and present as an issue is something which has been met with scorn and disbelief by the families.
When the inquests do get underway, however, Christine Keegan won’t be there to see it. She passed away in July.
Parents of those who died in the Stardust would be in their 70s, 80s and 90s now. Many of them will not be able to see what happens at these inquests.
Antoinette has fully taken on the example set by their mother. Common to many of those who have campaigned for these further inquiries is a strong sense of “we will not let this go”.
They are not satisfied with what previous inquiries have told them. They don’t feel they’ve gotten answers to the questions they’ve asked. They’re hopeful that these new inquests can provide them.
“She was our driving force throughout. Even when she was sick in bed she told me ‘these are my two daughters, I swear to god I won’t drop it’,” Antoinette says. “And I’m going to follow that. And my family around me are supporting me to do just that. We have to keep going.”
Another campaigner who won’t see the inquests is Eugene Kelly. His brother Robert died in the Stardust, and Eugene had been a central part of the campaigning efforts in recent years.
TheJournal.ie spoke to him for the Stardust podcast and spoke to him again outside Dublin Coroner’s Court for the first pre-inquest hearing just a week before he died suddenly in October.
When talking to Eugene, he was witty and friendly, always willing to have a chat. But there was always something niggling. Something he couldn’t let go.
He was a strong advocate and fierce campaigner who dearly missed his brother Robert.
The loss of a loved one in such horrific circumstances is traumatic, but it can also have a wider effect. Every life touches many others. The people who escaped the Stardust unharmed have as vivid a memory of that night as those who lost a brother, a daughter, a son.
At the time of the fire, a general numbness spread through the community. People would hug in the street. Those in their late teens and early 20s might have gone to a dozen funerals or more. Their classmates and friends who’d died.
Linda Bishop said: “Everywhere you went, you knew somebody or you’d hear another name. A girl who was in my class in school, two actually who were in my class in school. Just so many and then there was two of the Keegans, three McDermotts.
“It was just unbelievable. Then a girl who lived on my road. She had a little girl and she was killed. And then you heard another couple who left a baby behind. It was horrendous. It was just horrendous.”
Lorraine McDonnell, who lost her sister Teresa, described it as an “earthquake going through your home”.
“But the earthquake is still there,” she said. “It hasn’t gone away.”
Each person left behind their own legacy along with family and friends who would grieve for them.
As Charlie Bird put it in the Stardust podcast: “But what people have to remember that sometimes when journalists use a story, you say 48 people died in a fire. They’ve all got family and friends.
“That ripple effect spreads out. These are real people. It’s not just a number. 48 is not just a number. 48 is real people and their families and their friends and that ripple effect and we must always remember that. Even going back in time when we just talk glibly that 48 people died in a fire in 1981 in the Valentine’s night disco. We’re talking about real people. We should never forget that.”
Marking it today
Each year, as Errol describes, you’d run into the family members of other victims in the graveyard on the anniversary or at Christmas time.
For each of the last number of years, a large and well-attended event has taken place to mark the anniversary of the Stardust fire.
Like everything else now, this can’t happen the same way this year.
Instead, people will be asked to light a candle and say a prayer to mark the 48 who died.
“There’s a video going out on social media at 3pm,” Antoinette says. “It’s a pre-record of a candelit vigil. It has to be low key this year, and we understand that.”
The community cannot come together in person in the same way this year on what would have been one of the largest gatherings to date to mark the Stardust anniversary.
Linda Bishop says: “It’s a shame we can’t do it properly this year. I’d always go to the mass, and then over to the [Stardust] Memorial Park.
“You do see the same faces, sometimes it’s people you only see now once a year. When they read out everybody’s names, it’s always so heartbreaking. Looking at all the people affected by it.”
The Memorial Park on Dublin’s north side has recently been refurbished by Dublin city council, with a dedicated gardener assigned and butterfly bank added.
Those who were there that night have made that effort to explain to the younger generations the significance of what happened in the Stardust, and the effect it had on them.
“I have my family all around me, and they’re a tremendous help,” Errol says. “My mother and my brother, Albert, were front and centre in the campaigning before. And I never really got involved. It’s different now. I need to carry on what they were doing for Jimmy.
No matter how long it takes now it’s important to follow it through. Put all the cards on the table. Everybody is fucking dying around us. But there’s new faces coming up. We’ll carry it on for them.
Two people who’ve also remained campaigning are Maurice and Phyllis McHugh. Their only daughter Caroline went to the Stardust for the Valentine’s disco while they went to England for a family wedding.
Caroline never came home. She was just 17.
Phyllis told the Stardust podcast: “She wanted to do everything. She was very happy. I’m glad at the end we gave her everything she wanted. We didn’t have her for very long anyway.
“She wanted a motorbike. Maurice’s brother had been killed off a motorbike. He was only 25. We were saying no you can’t have a motorbike, you can have a car for your 21st. She didn’t make it that far.
“An awful lot of people have passed on with no idea what happened to their kids. You go to Sutton, you see the kids graves and then their mammy and daddy’s names below it… I’m very good now thank god. Except we haven’t got our child, that’s the sad part.”
Linda Bishop, recalling when she first met the McHughs, says it’s vitally important on a day like today to remember the people at the heart of this story. And make sure they’re never forgotten.
“It was actually at a wedding a few years ago,” she says. “I didn’t know who they were, but they were introduced to me. And I heard Caroline was in the Stardust, almost the same age as me. I’m 58 now.
“Phyllis asked me if I’d any children, and I said I’d two boys. She asked about grandchildren, and I said I have some of them too. And that’s what she was missing. Caroline had never gotten the chance to have that. She hadn’t either. That just breaks your heart.
I always say, willing or not, time is gonna come along and drag you with it. Whatever’s coming, will come. I’m so hopeful [with these inquests coming up]. People need to put this away. If they’re able to close the book on this at last, they won’t have to wake up every day thinking about it. It’s always here. It’s not over yet but I’m hoping some day it will be.
The below are the names of all those who died in the Stardust fire:
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Great research and great article! It always amazes me that Ireland’s revolution was started by very left wing elements, but within ten years had been hijacked by right-wing, monied conservatives. The church, I suspect, had much to do with that.
The Irish were paying back loans advanced by Great Britain to pay for Irish land at this time , yes we had to pay for our own Irish land …by comparison today’s austerity was caused by over the top borrowing
At this stage too the Proclamation had been cast aside as the opportunistic politicians seized the day , implemented vast pensions for themselves as the peasants starved and sometimes double and treble pensions for ministries which they exchanged frequently . Today’s FF /FG and Labour are their descendants in every way
Brian that’s a great comment. So many revolutions down the years have been hijacked, for the worse.
Hi Brian,
I don’t think it is accurate to say that Ireland’s revolution (if it was that, is replacing one set of elites with another really a revolution?) was started by left-wing elements and was hijacked by right-wingers years later. There were right and left wing elements from the beginning, I would suggest there were more right-wing elements than left at the beginning.
One only needs to look at one of those involved, Kevin O’Higgins who once said famously that he was part of a generation of ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’.
Even the left elements such as Connolly were very religiously-minded. Connolly wrote about how socialism and Catholicism were not mutually exclusive, and it was possible to be both. So what is to say that if the left-wing socialist element shined through, that it wouldn’t have stepped aside to a certain degree for the Catholic Church to take over?
The left-wing element is overplayed, partly I believe to do with the way Connolly was killed. He was an intellectual among poets and romantics. In fact they were such a disparate group in 1916, that if they had succeeded that ideological splits would have been inevitable. I have heard arguments that one faction would have had no problem overthrowing the other if it came to that. I believe that.
I think that the Catholic Church was so embedded in Irish society right back to Cardinal Cullen’s ‘Devotional Revolution’ in the aftermath of the Famine that no matter what element (left or right) had won control, they would have had to had some sort of coalition with the Catholic Church and it’s elite-minded ideology. I am not for one minute suggesting that was right and proper, it is just how Irish society was.
There’s a very interesting and authorities documentary on YouTube about the rise of Soviets in all Ireland in the days between the Rising and the height of the War of Independence. It shows how the social agenda was the dominant one across the country and soviets were taking over the means of production all over the island. It shows how they were run by ordinary women and men, Catholic, Protestant and dissenter. It also shows how they were betrayed by right wing nationalists and the trades union leadership and brutally suppressed. The nation agenda then became the dominant one resulting in the state we have today in Ireland.
Interesting how the same players are in power today, a century later, and still playing out the same desperate agenda.
This is why I’ll never vote for a political party again. No matter how many votes a party wins at an election, the majority always loses. Political parties owe allegiance to their own ideology and financial backers. In our adversarial political system, winning at all costs is essential and honesty, truth, fairness, decency and service take a very distant back seat.
I still believe in our system. We have 2 legislative houses, an independent legal system, a functioning civil service, a free responsible press and a written constitution.
Imagine what this wee state of ours would be like if there were no political parties and all TDs were independent and voted in accordance with their consciences and the will of the electorate and not the oligarchs who now rule, and ruin, Ireland.
Same old story then: a government obsessed with international standing decides on policies which have nothing to do with looking after its citizens.
Just goes to show that little(if anything) has changed!
‘Douglas added his opinion that “the present propaganda in the United States, alleging that there is a famine, will do great harm to our credit in every way unless it is countered”.’
That government may have been obsessed with international standing but for a pretty good reason – it needed credit to build up a country destroyed and divided after the Civil War and War of Independence.
And that’s a good reason to let citizens starve?
Reminds me of what is happening today… there would be people straving today in Ireland only for penny dinners and soup kitchens around the country and the kind generosity of the ordinary people of our country….
Sounds like nothing new then. Another Government cover up. Why am I not surprised
Seems that the business of Government in Ireland started life as an exercise in deceit, a system of rewarding those with land and position while punishing the poor and all the time pretending to care about all the people. Seems Labour then were the same as Labour now, subservient to the FG masters. We know to our cost that the deceitful practises of the major parties continue to this day but they haven’t much time left now.
@gerry as I understand it labour were in opposition during that period.
You are correct Bruce but let’s not have the facts get in the way of a good slander!
” Hogan was not the only one to ignore the suffering and starvation of the population. No one in the Dáil challenged the minister’s assertions – not even the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Thomas Johnson”
If Bruce and John R had actually read the article they would have noticed that. So it’s far from being a slander in this case.
Well you stated “subservient to FG masters”.
All I was pointing out was labour weren’t in govt so couldn’t be subservient.
From PJ hogan 100 years ago to Phil hogan now. Nothing has changed with regards to the calibre of politicians in this country
Was thinking the very same Niall.He came across with the same arrogance as present day Hogan.They bring in a blanket tax during a fuel shortage too.Shameful.
What would be next down the line?.A shoe tax.No way,would they be that stupid???
Same attitude as with them today.Do as your told and keep your mouth shut folks.
Nothing to see here,move along……..
Great article Fin. This was only one many cover ups unfortunately. Another been the economic war which ruined agriculture in Ireland. Calves were sold for their skin back them as exporting was prohibited. Well covered up by Dev obsessed historians like Diarmuid Ferriter.
And, as the past week has shown, plenty of modern day cover ups as well. This time using kangaroo courts.
Ferriter has written in the past about the effects of the economic war. Definitely no cover up there. He actually wrote a piece for gov.ie which talks about the effects. I’m not sure where you are getting that particular argument from.
interesting article. I know a bit on Irish history – but never knew about this.
Ireland was a newly independent nation. Its seems as if our leaders were very conscious of our image abroad. They wanted us to be seen as a successful prosperous nation, that could ‘stand on its own two feet’.
To admit to this famine would be to admit to failure. That’s possibly the reason for the cover up.
More research needs to be done on this important story.
Well done to the historians for their work, so far, on this.
And we had people recently trying to eulogize that bowsie WT cosgrave.
The real shame of the civil war was that Ireland lost so many of the progressive left wing figures who were anti treaty and we wound up with dyed in the wool tories running the country
Plus ca change.
Makes today’s austerity look like a walk in the park by comparison
If it were not for Facebook and YouTube the same politicians would be today ramming water taxes down the throats of the poor.!
Thanks for posting this article – was something I never knew about – puts the recent crisis into perspective
Great article. Well done on the research and the balanced way in which you reported the history.
At last a good article on Journal.ie, I was beginning to lose faith. Let’s hope this continues. A great read.
And remember it was the Garth Brooks debacle that was the national shame!!
The more things change the more they stay the same….
Once again historic scandals and inconvenient truths uncovered, I do enjoy the current hypocritical rant against SF,- the old Irish solution to an Irish problem of denial and deflection of any unpleasant problem that raises its ugly head. Its part of the Irish political and social psyche, if SF had handled the current situation in any other way they would not be Irish.
So your point Charles is that SF are like every one else? Good to know. That must make those who elect our politicians absolute hypocrites.
Please remember those that vote to elect the banks, lest we forget those that actually claim to run this nation!!
Bank of Ireland ‘own’ my property? Yet they have never canvassed my door, who is the puppets here?!
@sean what?
Thankful i live an an ireland full of taco chips and subway!
Fantastic article, well done.
The government was found wanting badly on this occasion but I believe we owe a debt of gratitude to WT Cosgrave who helped save this country from anarchy. It was touch and go at the start, but his decision to hand power over peacefully to Dev was a selfless act. Credit due too to FF for laying down their weapons.
A fascinating period of Irish history.
It was a selfless act to hand over power following an election which CNaG lost?
If you look at what was happening elsewhere what happened here was strikingly peaceful and progressive decolonisation.
Millions died in the 1840s famine, hundreds of emigrated after the economic collapse of the 1880s. How many died in the famine of the 1920s.
An Taoiseach Indah Kenny – I won’t have Ireland branded with the word defaulter……
And some people believe that country should have declared war against Nazi Germany 14 years later.
GrateArticle
I wonder how many TD’s in the present Dail are directly descended from those sitting around the table in 1925.
A government party later to become Fine Gael cut the old age pension by 10% back then a decision that was to haunt them for years to come, fast forward to today and Aer Lingus Aer Rianta and SRT pensioners are about to have their pensions slashed by 40% and a Fine Gael/Labour government have said they will sign in the necessary legalisation to facilitate this
Well let the existing staff pony to cover the loss
Would we not have prospered if we stayed part of the U.k?
It seems that we can’t really look after ourselves properly.
I live on Gorumna Island third pic down
Thank you for this very informative article. Is it any wonder then Labour have no conscience about the hardship ordinary people are suffering in this recession? May people are “starving” and literally too. They have to sacrifice food for bills. Its sad to read how so many poor had to suffer and die. How was this government so cruel and blind to their plight. Seriously the English would have been more charitable. Very good article.
PJ Hogan. 100Years,Reincarnated 2013PhilHogan.Funny old world.
Great article, not just for historic view..But the I hate Ireland brigade is out loving the the self loathing…look at cb2010….another example…good play journal good play keep spreading the depression!
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