Whiddy Island 40 years on: Still a sense of justice not having been done
In Bantry tomorrow, families from Ireland and France will gather to remember the Whiddy Island disaster of 40 years ago — many with questions still unanswered decades later, says
Night turned to day, there was fire in the sky - a world turned upside down. So unreal was the scene in the early hours of January 8, 1979, that all kinds of matter, including the nearest thing to steel fluff you can find, fell down from the heavens around Bantry Bay. One man refers to the nocturnal scene of a crowd gazing at the orange glow as being “like market day”. For one boy fleeing Whiddy Island “it was like Pompeii.” And for four-year-old Michael Kingston, it was the day after his fourth birthday.
