Mick Clifford: An agonising path to unwind injustice

Antoinette Keegan who lost two sisters in the Stardust fire holding posters and candles with other people associated with the disaster meeting in the Garden of Remembrance before going to the first day of the inquest. Picture: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ieSasko Lazarov

Where were you on February 14, 1981? Were you even alive? How much living have you done since then, from childhood or teenage years into adulthood, or from that station beyond into old age? How many of your loved ones who were around then are now gone?

The questions arise in a week when the inquest into the Stardust fire on the above date finally opened. The families of the 48 young people who died began this week to give pen pictures of the deceased. All brought to life the lives that were cruelly cut short in a tragedy that was not of their making. Loved ones rarely get over the death of a young person. They just learn to live with it, carrying it around as they try to get on with life. Usually, however, there is some class of closure in which the bereaved negotiate the various stages of grief, arriving eventually at acceptance. That was not possible for the Stardust families as they had to instead fight for decades to have the truth to be aired. There is every indication that the inquest now underway will at least arrive in the neighbourhood of what actually happened.