Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I think I am the final contributor. The Taoiseach gave a fulsome address and apology, which is to be welcomed. However, this apology will only be meaningful if it determines the next steps and if it examines how we got into this position. The Taoiseach has talked about how the institutions of the State let the people down. They did a lot more than that; they actively contrived to prevent the truth coming out. They actively contrived against the families who are here today in their quest to get the truth. The State and its institutions actively participated in a narrative that sought to defame those families. It is a great deal more than the institutions letting us down. The Taoiseach paid tribute, and rightly so, to the three women who sat in the cold hut outside Government Buildings 15 years ago and who are here with us today, namely Gertrude Barrett, Antoinette Keegan and Brigid McDermott. What the Taoiseach failed to do was outline the reason as to why they were sitting out in the cold. They were doing so for something as basic as getting a copy of the Coffey report. It must be remembered that this report came only after the Government of the day set up a non-statutory inquiry and John Gallagher SC had to resign because he had already represented the Garda Síochána.

We are here today because of the absolute courage and determination of the families who are here and of those who cannot be here. It is a humbling experience. It must be very uncomfortable for the families to sit through all of this, but it should be much more uncomfortable for us. This apology for the pain, death and suffering, the addictions and suicides that followed on from an absolutely appalling misuse of power has had to be extracted from the Government. What we are talking about here is the famous class divide in Ireland that is never spoken about. Quite clearly, that is what happened in this case. From day one, a narrative was determined because the powerful were in charge. The powerful have remained in charge and the narrative remained the same until today. Now, it has been lifted off and the Taoiseach has had to stand here and tell people they are innocent. They knew that from day one., but the powerful, through the institutions of the State, told them differently.

Let us have a quick, brief look at how we got here. We go back to 1981 and that dreadful night. The word "tragedy" is used and it was certainly a tragedy, but there was also absolutely no justice from day one. We start with the tragedy in the early hours of St. Valentine's Day. Then we had a tribunal headed by the former Mr. Justice Ronan Keane. It's 682-page report was issued in June of 1982. Quite a lot of what is contained in that report was damning of the owners of the Stardust and various institutions, including the local authority. However, Mr. Justice Keane came to a conclusion that was utterly not based on what he said. Some of the paragraphs in the report contradict previous paragraphs. In light of the evidence that was before him, he stated that the fire was probable arson. That presents a serious problem. Our job is to look back and ask "How in God's name did that happen?" After outlining all of the faults he found, Mr. Justice Keane was critical of the executive directors and of the safety measures in place. He stated:

Mr Eamon Butterly ... bears a ... responsibility for the practice of keeping the emergency exits secured with chains and padlocks ... a recklessly dangerous practice which regularly endangered the lives of over one thousand people ...

These were the strong conclusions of Ronan Keane, who was a High Court judge at the time. He went on to state that the cause of the fire was probable arson. How could that happen?

We go forward in time. What happens next? That tribunal was coexistent with the very faulty inquests that were held at the time for a few days. Those inquests did not consider at the wider circumstances; they just provided the medical cause of death of the victims.

We go forward again to Mr. Butterly and his family. In 1985 he gets more than £500,000 in compensation for malicious damage. We have Mr. Justice Sean O'Hanrahan concluding that the Stardust fire was started maliciously. Here is another judge backing up the narrative.

Then we go forward to the compensation tribunal in 1985, which was another insult to the families. We have Mr. Justice Donal Barrington, a much respected judge, and we have all the applications. However, there is no appeal against the findings of that tribunal except in the context of very specific points of law.

What is interesting about this is that we were told that we cannot compensate people for mental upset. Can you imagine that? Imagine going through all of this only to be told that by a judge. We then had John Keegan appealing the latter to the Supreme Court, and the narrative continued. On the day that the Supreme Court refused his appeal on the basis of whatever narrow grounds he took it, he died. Over and over again, this happened across the 43 years. I do not really have time to go into the details, but it is important to remember that it did not happen by accident.

We had Christy Moore's song, "They Never Came Home". As was mentioned previously, he was held in contempt by Mr. Justice Frank Murphy. He held that the song was in contempt of court and ruled that the lyrics of the song contained statements or comments calculated to prejudice a fair trial, but, apparently, the comments by the establishment in respect the people who, according to it, were telling lies did not prejudice anything or look down on anything. Here we had the powerful protecting the powerful.

There was a "Prime Time" programme in 2006, and a research dossier on behalf of the families by Geraldine Foy called "Nothing but the Truth - the case for a new public inquiry". Of course, that did not happen either. Then we had the Coffey report to which I referred to earlier. Bertie Ahern announced an external, independent examination. However, there was a conflict of interest, as I have pointed out, and there was the Coffey report. It has already been mentioned that the latter had to be revised. Mr. Coffey gave the Government an option. He said that if it did not take out the words "probable arson", there should be a full public inquiry. What did the Government do? It did not say that there was something seriously wrong and that we needed a public inquiry; it took out the words and left everything else intact. Then we go forward. Finally, thanks be to God, the public record was corrected. Then there was the McCartan report in 2017. McCartan added insult to injury. That report came on foot of the tremendous work of former Deputy Tommy Broughan. I pay tribute to him. He introduced me to the details of the Stardust fire when I became a TD in 2016. What does the former judge McCartan tell us? He states: "A dossier representing the case for a new enquiry was delivered to this Assessment". What does he tell us about it? He says it was "rambling, argumentative, disorganised and at times incoherent". He also stated that it was only at the end, on page 358, that there was any statement of what the new evidence was and that this was difficult to understand. This brings us up to 2017.

Then we go forward to 2019 and we have the very courageous solicitors at Phoenix Law. They go through the European Convention on Human Rights and Séamus Woulfe finally sees sense and says that there must be a new inquest. It took from 2019 to last week to get the verdict of unlawful death. What does that verdict say? It means that there has to be some accountability in the context of who is responsible for the unlawful deaths. There has to be something from the Government that recognises that in every report that I have seen in my limited time in the Dáil there is a self-serving narrative. We had the mother and baby homes report, which was left on the shelf for months. When it was finally released, people were told to download it. Then a scheme was set up where everybody who had been in a home for less than six months was excluded. The narrative persisted from the mother and baby homes report, but the evidence should have led to a different conclusion, just like report from Mr. Justice Ronan Keane. It led to a conclusion that the evidence from ordinary people was contaminated, not the evidence from the social workers, the priests or the judges. There is a narrative here that is the same as the narrative in relation to the Kerry babies tribunal. That tribunal was set up to investigate gardaí, but instead we got a narrative about Joanna Hayes and her family. They have received an apology and the survivors of the Stardust have received an apology, but the establishment has learned absolutely nothing. The powerful protect the powerful. What happened here was absolutely class distinction. If the Government does not face that and begin to learn from it, then we will have learned nothing.

I am indebted to the survivors for making me think and reflect. I am indebted to them for their courage.

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