A STARDUST SURVIVOR has told an inquest how her friend who died in the fire was not supposed to attend the club that night and said she could not walk down the road where she lived for a decade afterwards because “we promised her Mammy that she’d come home”.
Patricia O’Connor also told the jury at Dublin District Coroner’s Court today how she still hears the cries of people calling for their parents as they tried to escape.
“There was just… people screaming Mammy, Daddy help me…open the doors…That’s what I heard, that’s what I still hear,” she said.
Ms O’Connor told Kate Hanley BL, representing nine of the families of the bereaved including the family of Caroline Carey (17) who died in the fire, that initially Caroline was not meant to go to the Stardust on the night because she was “grounded”.
She said she and a friend called for Caroline, and after they appealed to her mother, Ms Carey was allowed to go on condition that she came home after the dance competition.
Ms O’Connor, who was just shy of her 17th birthday at the time, said they were all “so excited” to go to the club.
She said they saw Caroline’s father as they were walking down the road and he beeped at them. She said she couldn’t go up that road for ten years afterwards because “we promised her Mammy that she’d come home”.
The inquest into the fire which claimed the lives of 48 young people in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, 1981 heard Ms Carey was pregnant at the time.
Earlier Ms O’Connor gave evidence to Mark Tottenham BL, a member of the coroner’s legal team, that when her attention was first drawn to the fire, she only had time to stand up and make an attempt to lift her coat and bag before the lights went out.
“I turned around, out of the corner of my eye I could just see and hear just something shooting across…it was seconds… I’m not going to say it was flames because I didn’t see flames. I heard it more than I saw it.”
She said she put her hand out to grab her friend, but he fell and she fell on top of him while they were on the steps leading down towards the dancefloor.
“It was his legs I was holding onto,” she said.
Ms O’Connor said she could feel something like “tar” or “oil” dripping on her.
Asked how big the drops were, she said they were, “big enough to burn the whole of my arms, the whole of my back, my chest, my neck… I had third degree burns. They were big enough to all gel together.”
She said 52% of her body was burned as a result and told how she managed to escape by crawling and shuffling along the floor.
Ms O’Connor said she was about four or five feet away from the exit when a piece of wood fell on her back.
Ms O’Connor told Bernard Condon SC, for 10 of the families of those who died, that the smoke was so thick, “you could feel it and taste it” and she could barely breathe.
She said she could hear people screaming, “Mammy, Daddy help me…open the doors. That’s what I heard that’s what I still hear.”
The doors were locked but she could see the light outside, Ms O’Connor said. The doors eventually opened and she was brought outside.
Evidence was also heard today from Donna Mayne who told Gemma McLoughlin-Burke BL, a member of the coroner’s legal team, that within two minutes of her first seeing the fire, the lights went out and she was lifted out of her shoes by the force of the crowd and carried towards exit five.
“I just remember the blackness, the darkness, the extreme heat,” she said. “This quick flash of the 20 years of my life went before me.”
She said while she was at the exit door, she could hear a chain and a lock being shaken vigorously in an attempt to open the door.
“That’ll always stay with me… and hearing lads shouting, ‘the doors are f**king locked and we’re not getting out’… People kept saying that over and over again,” she said.
The witness said she was afraid she was going to die because “you just felt your whole insides were burning”.
She told how she could see people’s bodies “all lying across each other” between her and the exit doors before someone outside said ‘young one, move” and an arm came in and pulled her out.
In her original statement, Ms Mayne said the doors were eventually opened from the outside. She said she recognised a doorman called Mick who had a moustache.
Asked about this today, she said she may had thought they were opened from the outside because they were locked and chained on the inside.
She agreed, however, that she did not see them being opened.
Ms Mayne told Des Fahy KC, representing a number of families of those who died, that she thought the doorman she mentioned in her statement was Michael Kavanagh, whom she knew from the local area.
She said there were about ten people at the exit when she got there, and she could hear people pushing the bars up and down trying to open it.
She agreed that it was possible that the door opened through a combination of the force applied by the people inside and people trying to open the door from the outside.
Asked if the men she saw with Mr Kavanagh looked like members of management or door staff she said they were not, that they were young men aged around 19 or 20.
Patrick Behan gave evidence today of running into the toilets behind the stage. He said things were so bad, that he said the Act of Contrition and a Hail Mary into the ear of a teenage girl who was with him.
“I thought there’s no way out for me,” he told Sean Guerin SC, for a number of the bereaved families.
He said they were eventually rescued by a fireman who led them to safety through the burning building.
Mr Behan said the fumes in the club were so “toxic” that he believed people were being knocked out by them.
“It was like a scene out of a Holocaust,” he said. “It went up so fast no one had chances.”
The inquest also heard today how a Stardust patron saw the ceiling of the club collapse while people were still on the dancefloor.
Derek Brown told the 1981 tribunal of inquiry before Mr Justice Ronan Keane that he saw flames spread out across the ballroom and “all the ceiling collapsed”. Asked if it landed on any furniture or people, he replied, “on the dancefloor. There were people still there.”
He also described to gardaí in his initial statement, seeing a girl on fire inside the club after he had escaped.
Mr Brown said after he got out, he and two others went to exit five and grabbed “anyone we could see”.
He told of seeing a girl about ten feet away who was “covered in flames”, screaming and rolling around the floor.
Someone near him had a hook with a curve on the end and he tried to use it to pull her out but he couldn’t, he said.
When she stopped screaming, he presumed she was dead and ran out of the club again, he told gardaí.
Mr Brown was one of a number of unavailable witnesses whose statements to gardaí and evidence to the Keane Tribunal were read into the record today by members of the coroner’s legal team.
David Carroll told gardaí at the time that he had worked in the Stardust for two months and “it was normal to see chains on the doors”. He said after the fire was seen, he ran to exit five where there were people lying on the ground and he had to walk over them to get to the door.
He said there was a chain on the door which he tried and failed to open. Mr Carroll said he then “gave up” and was lying on the ground gasping for air when he looked up and saw the door was open.
Mr Carroll told the Keane Tribunal that he saw debris falling from the ceiling onto a girl’s dress which then caught fire. He said he believed the girl died in the fire as he did not see her come out.
Patrick Morgan also told gardaí he saw someone on fire as he tried to escape. He said he lay on the ground with others who had collapsed in the club before he “got a breath of air” and crawled towards the exit.
In his 1981 statement, Paul Walker, who was 17 at the time, said after he escaped the club, he went back in and grabbed a girl who was on fire and pulled her out.
Patrick Crowe told gardaí he was at home in bed when his son John, who was a barman in the Stardust, came running into his bedroom and told him the club was on fire.
He said on three occasions in the three years preceding the fire, he had been in the Stardust when the power had failed for no apparent reason.
In his 1981 statement, Tony Deegan said when the fire took hold debris started to drip down on him and his shirt and back caught fire. He said he was eventually dragged to safety by a fireman.
Maureen Dudley said that between 1.20am and 1.40am on the night of the fire, she was in the Lantern Rooms with her parents and remarked to her father three times that she got the smell of smoke.
William Murphy was also in the Lantern Rooms on the night of the fire.
He told gardaí that after he escape, he went to the front of the building and broke down the kitchen door. He said he crossed over to another exit from the kitchen which opened into a corridor. He said there was a “ball of flame in this corridor and he closed the door.
He said there was no one in the kitchen and he went back outside and told the young people trying to break the kitchen windows that there wasn’t any point as there was no one in there.
Mr Murphy said he saw a fire officer take a fire hose from outside into the main entrance. There was hardly any pressure from this hose, he said, and it was so bad that the fire officer remarked: “I’m wasting my f**king time here”.
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