THE FIRST FIREFIGHTER at the scene of the Stardust fire said “God almighty, I’ve never seen anything like it” before immediately calling for backup, an inquest jury has heard.
Laurence “Larry” Neville, who was working as a barman in the Silver Swan bar at the time, told the inquest that he was the first person to phone 999 for assistance telling emergency services: “Can you get down here please there’s over 800 people at the Stardust… and the fire has got very serious.”
Neville said only one firefighter initially attended the scene and he brought this firefighter in through an exit and along a passageway which led to the lightroom.
Neville said when they got there “the whole floor was gone”.
“He got out and went into his fire engine, he got onto his radio and within 20 minutes then there was every fire engine you could think of, guards, ambulances civil defence and a load of priests,” Neville told Simon Mills SC, a member of the coroner’s legal team.
The jury also heard that three weeks before the fire, Neville and others working at the Stardust saw a smoke-like substance in the club.
Neville said workers in the complex were unsure whether it was smoke or fog or dust but were concerned enough to investigate.
He said he and other employees “checked everything” but could find nothing wrong.
The barman said on the same date, he went to the lightroom to turn on the stage lights but could not get them to work.
He agreed with Sean Guerin SC, representing a number of families of those who died, that “on the face of it” there appeared to be some problem with the electrical supply to the stage that night and that no one ever “got to the bottom of it”.
Under cross examination from Guerin, Neville denied he had tried to “fabricate” an account that he had saved 30 people through the dispense bar.
Neville said he had “pointed” people in the direction of the exit and they had followed him out.
Guerin suggested to the witness that if any patrons got out that night that way “they could be counted on one hand”.
“I’m going to suggest to you Neville that that simply didn’t happen,” said Guerin. “It did,” Neville replied.
He put it to the witness that one of the criticisms of the Stardust and the people who owned and managed it was that the staff got out and the patrons were “left to fight their way out through locked exit doors” and that what he had tried to do was to fabricate an account of rescuing 30 people and taking them out through the Silver Swan for the purpose of responding to that criticism.
“I had nothing to do with that,” said Neville.
The barman told Guerin he only saw Stardust manager Eamon Butterly once after the blaze broke out, when he went into the Silver Swan to alert staff to the fire.
He confirmed to counsel that he did not hear Butterly or any other member of management giving any “direction or instructions” about what to do.
Neville told barrister Gary Maloney, appearing for Patricia Kennedy, the mother of Marie Kennedy who died in the blaze, that he could not recall glasswasher Declan Burnett mentioning to him that he noticed a burning smoke smell on the night of the fire.
Maloney said Burnett had given evidence to the inquest that he had told the witness about the smell and that Neville had said it was “probably a cigarette”.
Asked if he recalled this incident, Neville said he did not.
Dr Myra Cullinane asked Neville if he was sure that only one firefighter was in the first fire engine that arrived on the scene and the witness confirmed that this was correct.
The inquest also heard this afternoon that the club’s head doorman Tom Kennan, told gardaí he almost went home with the keys to all the emergency exits in his pocket.
The statements made by Kennan, an unavailable witness, to gardaí were read into the record today by Mark Tottenham BL, a member of the coroner’s legal team.
The jury heard that Kennan made no reference to opening the exit doors in his initial statement to gardaí on 14 February, 1981, but in subsequent statements he said he unlocked all the exit doors at midnight and left the chains hanging on the doors.
Kennan told gardaí that he had been in the Silver Swan bar at around 1.30am when one of the barmen came in a short time later and shouted “fire”.
He said when he went into the Stardust to see what was going on he “immediately thought the fire was bad” and decided to try to get people out through Exit A [Exit One] which was the nearest one to him.
He said he got as many people as he could out there but when he tried to re-enter the passage, he was prevented from doing so by thick smoke.
In his second statement to gardaí, Kennan said on the night of the fire Stardust manager Eamon Butterly had a discussion with him about security.
He said it had come to Butterly’s notice that people were getting into the club without tickets and the pair discussed employing permanent security staff.
He said sometime after 11.30pm, possibly nearer midnight, Butterly approached him and said there was someone on the roof or at one of the exits.
He said the two of them went to exit number one.
Kennan said in his statement that the chain was on the door and it was locked.
The chain was linked from one pushbar to the other and secured together with a lock.
He said it was normal practice to have all the exits locked in this manner when the show was over.
Kennan said the key to all these locks were kept together and marked A, B, C, D and E and told how the key to the main exit was separate.
He said Butterly told him “open all the exits now” and he went and got the keys and opened all the locks by removing the chains linking the push bars, looping the chain over one side and again and locking the chain giving the impression that the door was secure.
He said the reason for this was because the doors were “constantly being opened by patrons to allow friends in”.
The head doorman said sometime later, as things were quiet, he decided to go home and was about to go out the Lantern Room door at the Silver Swan entrance when he put his hand in his pocket and discovered that he had all the keys for exits one, three, four, five and six.
He said he went back into the main door of the Stardust where [doorman] Frankie Downes was standing and gave the bunch of keys to him.
He said he told Downes that all the exits were open.
The inquest continues tomorrow when Kennan’s historical statements will continue to be read to the jury.
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