Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Forty-three years. I join others in welcoming the families to the Gallery and saying the unlawful killing verdict is very welcome, the formal State apology that has been given is very welcome and the inquests' conclusion as to how the fire started and why it spread so rapidly is welcome. It has put to bed once and for all the original tribunal’s conclusion that the fire was probably started deliberately. That was a highly damaging finding which pointed the finger of blame at the very community who had suffered the most. This conclusion may have been removed from the public record in 2009, but it left questions about the cause of the fire unanswered officially until last week. An inquest is a statement of fact. The families and relatives now have official confirmation of what they have always known to be true, namely that this was not in any way their fault and that their loved ones were unlawfully killed.

For most of us, the anguish and trauma of losing your loved ones in a fire is utterly unimaginable. To have your son or daughter go out for the evening and never return home because they died in a horrific fire would break any parent’s heart. It is difficult to imagine the level of panic felt by mothers and fathers who woke that Saturday morning to find their children’s beds empty. We cannot even begin to think what must have been going through their minds as they began the frantic search for their loved ones in Garda stations, hospitals and, sadly for some, at the makeshift morgue at the Dublin Coroner’s Court, where a tent had to be erected by the Army medical corps due to the mounting death toll. It was here that some of the most distressing scenes were witnessed, with many parents handed items of jewellery or pieces of clothing in order that their children could be identified. Five victims went to their graves without being identified, their bodies placed side by side in a common plot in St. Fintan’s Cemetery in Sutton. It would take until 2007 for advances in DNA technology allowed for these victims to be finally identified. The concentration of victims who came from within a mile radius of the Stardust was staggering. It is hard to find a family in this part of the city that has not been impacted in some way by the tragedy.

The tight-knit northside community still bears the scars of that dreadful night and its immediate aftermath – the multiple funerals, the empty school desks the following week and the colleagues who would never turn up for work again. For many families, the passage of time did not ease the pain. This was not helped by the lack of counselling or mental health supports for families and survivors, just one of many State failings in the official response to the Stardust tragedy. Some 14 years after the fire, a report given to the congress of the World Federation for Mental Health found that many parents were still utterly consumed by grief. When the report’s findings were presented at a conference in Trinity College, one doctor described the families as "quite an ill population". Some of the parents interviewed reported a deterioration in their physical health. Others said there had been no lessening of their feelings of loss since the fire and that other parents had died of heartbreak. To think that these same parents would be put through another three decades of waiting for a dignified response from the State, heaping trauma upon trauma, is simply beyond our comprehension. It is the unwavering love for their lost ones that drove these families to persist for 43 years in seeking the truth.

I pay tribute the 48 people who lost their lives as the result of unlawful killing at the Stardust and who never came home. I pay tribute to those who survived the fire and lived the rest of their lives with the trauma of that night, when they lost brothers, sisters and friends who did not make it out alive. I pay tribute to those emergency service workers, hospital staff, doctors, taxi drivers and all those who cared for and supported the victims of the fire and the survivors on that awful night. I pay tribute to the families who lost their loved ones in the Stardust and campaigned year in and year out for the truth for their loved ones. I especially pay tribute to those family members, many of them parents, who did not live to see this day and never got to hear their loved ones’ reputations being exonerated last week. The families who lost loved ones have had to fight every step of the way for over 43 years. Which of us can imagine what that would be like? Imagine the pain of losing your son or daughter, brother or sister or your parents and then having to fight every step of the way for truth and justice only to have the State and the political establishment turn their backs on you and frustrate you at every turn. They were ignored, they were not believed and they felt treated like second-class citizens.

Let us not pretend that this shameful mistreatment all belongs in the distant past, because it does not. Even when the decision was taken to hold the inquests, the families and their legal representatives had to fight step by step to ensure the process would work. They had to fight for a workable system of legal aid. They had to ask again and again for the inquest to be set up in a way that could work. They even had to fight for a venue in which to hold the inquests.

Time after time, they had to keep pushing simply in order that the truth could be established. Today, after 43 years, the Stardust families finally have truth on their side.

Have lessons been learnt? When it comes to building standards and regulations, we still have a very long way to go. Two words sum up the problem, namely "light touch". We still have a form of light-touch building control and regulation in Ireland. How many times in recent years have we seen fires rip through homes where there was meant to be proper fire separation and compartmentalisation? Why is it still not being taken as seriously as it needs to be? The fire safety regulations have just been reviewed and updated. One of the issues I raised in a submission was that of smoke toxicity. As it is generally smoke and not fire that kills people, the level of smoke toxicity in building materials is highly important. On 14 June 2017, 72 people lost their lives in a devastating fire at Grenfell Tower. While many factors contributed to this horrendous loss of life, exceptionally high levels of smoke toxicity were a key issue. A 2004 report from the UK's Building Research Establishment noted that just two countries in Europe have no standards with respect to levels of smoke toxicity. Those two countries were the UK and Ireland. It is alarming that the updated building regulations on fire safety fail to regulate and limit smoke toxicity levels. When will the lives of people be put first and ahead of the interests of the companies that continue to lobby for low standards?

After 43 years, making a State apology is without a doubt the correct thing to do. However, we can and should do better than that. As legislators, we can get things right in the first place. We can stand up against light-touch regulation and regulations written by and for industry. We can put the lives of people first. No one should ever have to go through what the 48 families have had to endure over the last four decades. If we are serious about that, we need to be serious about fire safety standards and regulation. In addition to today's overdue apology, this would be a fitting and enduring tribute to the 48 young people who so needlessly lost their lives in the Stardust fire.

See this speech in context