‘The Last Disco’ brings the story of the Stardust fight for justice to a conclusion

Their love undimmed and their resolve unbroken, families of the Stardust victims kept going, writes Sean Murray

Family and friends of the Stardust fire victims at the Coroners Court inquiry into the tragedy at The Rotunda Pillar Room in Dublin. Their love undimmed and their resolve unbroken, they kept going and going until that fateful day in April when they heard the words 'unlawful killing'. Photo: Gareth Chaney/ Collins Photos

NOBODY who was in the room that day will ever forget it. I certainly won’t. I could be a journalist for another 30 years and I really doubt I’ll feel such raw emotion and energy as I felt in the room that day.

The Pillar Room on the grounds of Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital had become almost a second home for me, and a handful of other media colleagues, for the guts of a year. Not to mention the families of the victims, some of whom came every single day. And the lawyers. And the jury. And the coroner.

It had all built up to this moment. The moment when the jury foreman said that the 48 victims of the Stardust fire were unlawfully killed.

As I looked around at the faces of the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and the friends of those who died all hugging and crying at this milestone 43 years in the making, I found myself welling up too.

I’d covered this story for years. I’d spoken to families and I’d spoken to survivors. I visited some in their homes as they told me what had happened to them. I listened to them bravely stand up in a courtroom to tell their story.

I listened to the experts say what they believed caused the devastating fire. It’s a cliché of journalism that people in this job act as a witness to history. To record events of such magnitude and importance.

It’s been the greatest privilege of my professional life to be a witness to the Stardust families’ long fight for justice. 

Particularly, it was a privilege to be there on the day they were vindicated at last. And it was a privilege to be able to tell that story in a book I’ve co-written with some colleagues.

Everyone old enough to remember 1981 remembers hearing about the Stardust fire. My mother had seen Gene Pitney there once and remembers having a drink with her brother in Temple Bar that day, able to recall the horrible, sombre mood that hung over Dublin.

It’s a common thing you hear when you bring the Stardust up with someone — “oh my father was meant to go that night” or “my mam went there all the time”. It was such a popular venue, attracting people from all over Dublin, but particularly those North Dublin areas near the club in Artane.

The events of that night of the Valentine’s disco-dancing competition have etched themselves into Irish cultural memory. The image of the young, carefree patrons going to meet their friends, to have a dance and let their hair down. The night winding down and people noticing a small fire in a corner of the nightclub.

The incredibly rapid spread of the blaze that soon engulfed the entire venue. The panic, the mayhem. The rush to get out.

Those who escaped hearing people screaming from toilets that had steel plates blocking the windows. The brave first responders who rushed in. The horrific reality that so many young people had lost their lives.

Aftermath

The devastating aftermath. The disquiet over the locking of the doors at the Stardust. The walls covered in extremely flammable carpet tiles. And the families let down again and again by the Irish State — for decades.

While researching the book, I came across a story written in the Evening Herald that same day that just captured it all so well. The headline simply read: “Why? Oh Jesus Why?” Its lead story said: “Dublin mourned its dead children today. A tangled mass of charred wreckage stood as their funeral pyre. A black pall of smoke hanging over a burnt-out nightclub was their shroud.”

I was born 11 years after the events of the Stardust fire and in a different part of Dublin. I knew about the Stardust in the same way many people did. This horrific event that had happened, and that the families were still fighting for answers.

It was that basic grasp of it that I had when I first started to properly research the tragedy in 2019. It was around the time of the anniversary and it was in the news again. So I decided to research it. The more I read, the more baffled and incredulous I became.

In the wake of the fire, the Government set up the Keane Tribunal to investigate what happened. It’s a tome, hundreds of pages long, and so very thorough.

Up until its conclusions when it says, without evidence to suggest that it had happened, that the fire was “probably” started deliberately. The people of North Dublin took that to mean they were being told one of their own was an arsonist.

Never mind the practice of keeping the doors locked while patrons were on the premises. Or of the carpet tiles on the walls not being of the standard required by the local authority. There were so many more details besides that that my jaw would frequently drop as I discovered more of this story.

At that time in 2019, all these years on, the families were fighting to get a new inquest. I went to my eventual co-author Christine Bohan and said we have to tell this story. Bring it to a new generation and also remind the older ones of this tragedy, and what the survivors and families are fighting for.

We thought it was in the public interest to highlight this again so the result was The Stardust Podcast, a six-part series telling the story up to that point. The response to it was beyond our expectations.

So many people engaged with this story who hadn’t before. We brought it to a new audience — and an international one at that. This book we’ve now written is an extension of that, bringing the story to a conclusion.

I will forever be grateful to those who spoke to me for it. I’m in awe of their bravery and their conviction to never give up. They always struck me as thoroughly decent people, thrust into this horrific nightmare that they couldn’t escape from. That pain lingering for so long in the face of stonewalling and a lack of answers as to what truly happened.

Their love undimmed and their resolve unbroken, they kept going and going until that fateful day in April when they heard the words “unlawful killing” — and the dam of emotion burst in the Pillar Room.

Myself, Christine, and our colleague Nicky Ryan have now recorded that story from start to finish in The Last Disco: The Story of the Stardust Tragedy.

We believe the Stardust is a story that Ireland should never forget.