Families just wanted to find out the truth – that wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

In February 1981, my father-in-law had his first burglar alarm put in. The man installing it arrived with a young apprentice who was in some discomfort and kept having to stop work to cough up a soot-black substance. The poor boy hacked and spluttered but kept going – it turned out he had been at the Stardust on the night of the fire. Just the name of the venue, synonymous with tragedy and grief, sent a chill through the room. But that stoical Dubliner, clearly back working before he was fit, was among the lucky ones who had gone to the Artane nightclub and survived the inferno.

The disaster, for which no one was held accountable, happened in the constituency of Charlie Haughey, then taoiseach, and he was quick to announce a public investigation into the disaster that killed 48 people aged between 16 and 26 and left hundreds injured.

Four months later, he was out of office after losing a general election. The Fianna Fáil vote collapsed to 78 seats – a number the party would be thrilled to achieve today – and Fine Gael surged to 65, joined forces with Labour and propelled Garret FitzGerald into government.

That year was a turbulent one for Ireland. On March 1, the Long Kesh hunger strikes began with Bobby Sands and ended with 10 men dead. The republican prisoners demanded political status in a head-to-head collision with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher that attracted international coverage. (“Crime is crime is crime, it is not political,” she insisted.)

The hunger strike was called off by the republican leadership in October, but proved to be a propaganda coup: not only did IRA recruitment swell, but the impact from a political movement was recognised. From prison, Sands won a Westminster by-election that April, while two Dáil seats were taken by pro-hunger strike candidates in June and directly contributed to Sinn Féin’s progression towards becoming a mainstream political party.

If Ireland was having a tough year in 1981, so was England, where riots erupted in various cities from long-standing tensions between the police and black communities. In London, the Brixton riots broke out in April – “a spontaneous outburst of built-up resentment”, according to a government-authorised report that found indiscriminate use against black people of new police stop and search powers.

July brought the Toxteth riots in Liverpool and civil unrest in Birmingham, Manchester and other places, fuelled by inner-city deprivation and high unemployment in a recession.

A month before Stardust, serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was caught by police after a murderous spree between 1975 and 1980. He was convicted on 13 counts of murder and seven of attempted murder and was linked to other unsolved cases. All his victims were women.

His mother, Kathleen Coonan, was from Connemara, and he sometimes used Peter Coonan as an alias. The lorry driver, characterised by a psychologist as “extremely callous, sexually sadistic”, claimed the voice of God had sent him to kill prostitutes. He spent the rest of his life in custody and died in hospital in 2020, aged 74.

Internationally, it was a dark time – a year of assassinations or attempts on leaders. Across the Atlantic, US president Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated, with his brand of Reagonomics (lower taxes, less government spending and regulation) and determination to contain, if not “roll back”, Soviet expansionism.

But on March 30, 1981, he was shot in the lung after a speaking engagement in Washington DC and was close to death with internal bleeding by the time he arrived in hospital. Emergency surgery saved his life.

By a peculiar twist, the fundraiser he had attended immediately before the shooting was held in Ford’s Theatre where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 – the first US president to be murdered, but by no means the last.

Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr, did it to impress actor Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to psychiatric care.

In May, Pope John Paul II was hit by two bullets and wounded in the stomach, arm and hand in St Peter’s Square in Rome. His fleeing attacker, Mehmet Ali Agca, was apprehended by several people in the crowd, including a nun. The Pope asked people to “pray for my brother… whom I have sincerely forgiven” and visited him in jail.

That October, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was less fortunate. He was assassinated during an annual victory parade in Cairo, and 10 others were also killed. Ireland’s defence minister James

Tully was among the injured. Five men were executed for the jihadist hand grenade and gun attack.

But hope blossomed, too, in the world. In Poland, the Solidarity movement had been founded the previous August, and the trade union is widely recognised as a major contributor to the end of communist rule there.

Also in February 1981, Buckingham Palace announced Charles and Diana’s engagement – the beginning of a fairytale romance that didn’t produce the expected happily-ever-after. The distracting glamour of a royal wedding, to which Ireland wasn’t immune, was scheduled for July.

This was the year when the DeLorean gullwing sports car, featured in three Back To The Future films, rolled off the production line in an industrial estate in Dunmurry, outside Belfast. By the end of 1981, 7,500 had been produced, but only 3,000 were sold and the company was soon in receivership.

More than 40 years have passed. The world moves on with its own concerns and tragedy is soon set aside.

But the Stardust families never forgot their young people who didn’t come home from a night out. They continued to ask questions about the circumstances at a jam-packed Valentine’s disco where fire-safety regulations were breached.

Today, it is worth pausing to reflect that it took more than 40 years before details of what happened to members of a working-class community came to light. Without persistent campaigning by Stardust relatives who lobbied politicians tenaciously and held protests and vigils, it would have remained in the shadows. They simply wanted the truth. It was never too much to ask.

‘Today, it is worth pausing to reflect that it took more than 40 years before details of what happened to members of a working-class community came to light’