Families still waiting for the truth after 40 years

EVERY parent has experienced it at some stage. Maybe it only lasts for a few minutes; at worst, it can be a few hours of anxiety before the fear subsides, you realise that all is well and you can relax again. For some parents, however, there is no relaxing, no easing of that anxiety. Ever again.

Imagine that, just imagine how that must feel. The beginning of a nightmare that starts, ironically, when, suddenly, you wake up.

What was that? Was that the door closing quietly? Is he home? Your son. Is that him back in from his Friday night out with his friends? No, maybe not; he’s normally like an elephant clumping around the place and there’s no sound at all now – no footfall on the stairs, no sound from the bathroom. The house lies silent in the darkness. You turn over in bed and look at the clock – 3am. That gives you a start. He’s not usually out this late. Maybe you were dozing earlier when he slipped in; he’s probably tucked up in bed by now, his jeans dropped on the floor, the new trendy shirt bought specifically for tonight’s disco flung with abandon to land… well, wherever it lands. Tidiness is not his strong point. And you smile to yourself as you lie there in the darkness, smile at the thought of the way he always turns his eyes to the heavens when you tell him he needs to tidy up after himself. “We can’t all be neat freaks, Ma!” you can hear him say as he reaches out, towering over you, and gives you a hug. Yes, he’ll be in already and fast asleep by now; that’ll be it, you think to yourself. So you pull the bed covers back up around you and you try to get back to sleep.

After half an hour of tossing and turning and still unable to shake off that niggling worry at the back of your mind, you can’t stand the uncertainty any longer. So up you get and, quiet as a mouse so as not to waken your husband, you gently open your bedroom door and pad silently across the landing in your bare feet.

Very slowly and quietly you turn the handle of your son’s bedroom door and you peek in. No jeans on the floor. No discarded shirt. No giveaway nicotine whiff. No mop of dark hair peeping out from under the covers. No son.

What you don’t realise then, as alarm bells start to ring in your head – and what your mind actually couldn’t deal with then, even if you knew the awful reality that was about to engulf you – is that there will never again be jeans discarded on that bedroom floor, or any other clothes tossed all over the place.

You will never again have cause to give out to him about smoking. Nor will you ever again peep into that room and see his lovely dark hair on his pillow.

Because, as you, his mother, make your way downstairs that night to put on the kettle and make a cup of tea – in what is now the early hours of Valentine’s Day – your 19-year-old son is fighting for his life in the back of an ambulance as it makes its way, siren blazing, through the streets of Dublin, hoping to find a hospital that isn’t already full to capacity with other youngsters who are also suffering, like your darling son, from burns and severe smoke inhalation. Other youngsters who, like your untidy, exasperating and completely adorable son, are also struggling to stay alive.

It’s a struggle that is simply too much to bear for so many of them in the early hours of that February morning. Forty-eight of them. Fortyeight youngsters who went out to a Friday-night disco and never came home. Forty-eight neighbours, friends, sweethearts, sons, daughters. Your lovely boy among them.

Stardust. Valentine’s Day, 1981. Forty years ago this weekend. Forty years without sons and daughters, brothers and sisters; 40 years of heartache for so many families. Forty years without answers. Forty years just seeking one simple thing: the truth.