Stardust tragedy made us realise how fleeting youth was in 80s Dublin

Iwas living in Dublin in 1981 when the Stardust fire happened. The recent coverage of the tragedy arising from the conclusion of the inquests brought me back to that time. I have abiding memories of the aftermath of that awful night. For days, the city was almost silent insofar as Dublin could be with its endless processions of raucous and smoky buses. On the Tuesday after the fire, a national day of mourning was observed and I remember going to a special memorial mass that evening in the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners in Rathmines.

It was a favoured place of worship for the young, and hosted a ‘folk mass’ every Sunday evening for a congregation made up of flat-dwellers, students and junior civil servants recovering from Saturday night on the town or returning from their weekend at home in the country.

On that Tuesday in 1981, the same young worshippers filled its pews, along with others of our generation who didn’t go to church, chapel or meeting house. With an average age of about 20, the crowd was around the same age as the victims of the Stardust, and we needed to be with a crowd that evening to reach for something beyond this Earth to comfort us in the face of our common fragility.

I was living with a neighbour from home and we shared a flat on the Rathgar Road. He worked in a bar on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and I worked on Dawson Street with the now-departed Tara Travel. I was a skint young man selling sunshine holidays to less skint compatriots.

It was a very different Ireland, in the grip of a recession that seemed like it would never end. I remember it as a time when everyone was living from one pay day to the next. From Monday to Thursday, I took the bus into work and would buy 20 fags and a newspaper for about 75p in a shop at the top of Dawson Street.

On Thursdays, I would walk home after work as I wouldn’t have the bus fare and on Friday mornings, I’d either get up early and walk or I’d scour the flat for the price of the bus.

While scavenging might deliver the bus fare, there certainly wouldn’t be a bob for the paper or a packet of fags until you were paid on Friday. When times were dire altogether, I might have to go without news and nicotine for a week.

Around that time, in the early 80s, a US diplomat who had served at the Dublin embassy and moved on to another appointment wrote a withering piece on life in Dublin. He spoke about how dull it was as a capital city, how awful the weather was and about the bland food.

The article caused uproar. Bord Fáilte went into meltdown and someone suggested the US ambassador should be hauled in by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and told to rein in his precious officials.

He was right to a great degree — not only were people like me broke, the whole country was broke. There wasn’t a spare shilling to do anything.

The North was in agony, the big hunger strike was about to begin and Maggie Thatcher’s strident self-righteousness meant there was neither imagination nor flexibility to search for a solution. But we did search for joy and abandon in all of it. Bagatelle released their iconic Summer In Dublin in May 1980 and we sang it with gusto and in hope that the sunshine was real, that perhaps everyone did look so well and that the lyrics had a grain of truth beyond the fact that the Liffey stank like hell.

We hitched and blagged our way to festivals in fields from Lisdoonvarna to Ballybunion and Ballisodare, and we went to places like the Stardust to celebrate the only things we had — ourselves and our youth.

That night, a tragedy that should never have happened taught us how fleeting they were.

‘We went to fields in Lisdoonvarna, Ballybunion and places like the Stardust to celebrate the only things we had — ourselves and our youth’