Maureen Farrell Lawlor, from Cabra, had an impeccable sense of style and took pride in her pristine home. Her greatest joy, however, came from being the best mother possible to her little girl, Lisa.
Introduction
I was 17 months old when my father, Francis, who was twenty-five years old and my mother, Maureen who was twenty-three years old went out for a few drinks on Valentine's night.
I have no memories whatsoever of my two parents other than the pain, loss, and complete and utter devastation. I grew up in the shadow of this disaster. I lived with my father’s parents. I’m an only child and the Stardust left me on my own in this world.
Background
Everything I know about my parents is from other people’s stories. When I was a child, I was so hungry for information about my Mam and Dad that I would cling to whatever scraps about their lives I heard from anyone who mentioned them. My aunts and other members of the family told me endless stories about my parents, Maureen, and Francis.
My mother, Maureen Farrell
Maureen – my mother - grew up in Cabra. She was one of seven children. She was a confident child until, at the age of 15, she was seriously hurt, knocked down by a car on Gardiner Street. Her pelvis was badly damaged. Her self-confidence and her school life took a hit. She left school after the Inter-Cert exam to work in a butcher’s shop on Dorset Street in the north inner city, where she wrapped up people’s orders and worked the till.
Maureen was pretty: petite and slender with rosy cheeks, a fashionable blonde perm, and blue eyes. All the boys liked her. However, she did not have a lot of social confidence and was a shy young woman. By the time she reached her teens, things had started going badly wrong in her family, too. There were some issues in the broader family with mental health and violence. Some of Maureen’s relatives started getting into trouble and one of the effects on Maureen was that she became obsessive about hygiene and having order in her life. Nobody could have looked at her and guessed that she was often anxious about her broader family life, because she was always immaculately dressed and groomed.
This meant that Maureen shared the interest my father, Francis, had in clothes. They fell in love very quickly and got married when Francis was 19 and Maureen was 17. In their wedding photo, they almost look like kids playing at being grown-ups.
All Maureen ever wanted was to be a mother raising a happy family. After the sadness of several miscarriages, I was born. Maureen was thrilled to be a parent for the first time, and she set about organising and decorating our home in meticulous detail. People said it was like a showhouse lifted and set down in an ordinary northside suburb.
Like a lot of young mothers, she was very anxious about getting everything right. Her preoccupation with cleanliness and homemaking increased. She was always concerned about protecting me and keeping me clean. She washed the wheels of my pram every day.
13th February 1981
My family would tell me that I was the light of my parents’ life and that they were totally smitten with their baby girl. The only wonder was that they went out that night at all because they never liked to leave me. I have heard so much about my parents and that awful night, that sometimes it feels as though I had been there myself. Over the years, I feel as though I have been able to piece together much of what happened on the last night of their young lives.
My Dad said to my Mam that they’d hardly been out since the wedding, and even less since I was born. He said it was Valentine’s weekend and they should take some time to themselves for once. My mam, Maureen, was not sure at all about going out. She hated leaving me alone and always kept me spotlessly clean and dressed in beautiful clothes. She hardly ever let my aunties and cousins touch me and hated the thought of leaving me with a babysitter, especially because I was just getting over a cough.
My Dad persuaded her by explaining that he had an invitation to go to the disco in the Stardust, and that there was going to be a dancing competition there that night. He took his wedding ring off and put it on top of the telly to keep it safe before they went out.
Stardust Fire
My parents ended up staying longer than they originally had intended but they were having a lot of fun and did not want to miss the dance competition.
Then the fire broke out.
Francis, my dad, managed to get out of the inferno and into the cold night air which must have hurt his scorched lungs. He started to run around looking for Maureen in the huddled groups of young people in a state of shock outside. None of them knew who Maureen was and just shook their heads, many crying or unable to speak.
Francis realised she was still inside. Francis filled his lungs with air and ran back into the fire to get her.
Neither Francis nor Maureen ever came out again.
Since then
Francis and Maureen’s funeral was a group funeral with other victims held in Donnycarney church in Artane. Mourners spilled outside into the church grounds and many of the young people who had survived the fire, some still in bandages, came to the funeral to say goodbye to their friends. People have told me about seeing me there holding my grandmother’s hand. Though I don’t remember the funeral, I am glad that I was there.
When news had come through that there was a terrible fire at the Stardust, the teenage girl who had been hired to mind me ran out of the house in a panic because one of her family members was at the disco. In her fright, she must have completely forgotten about me or assumed somebody would come and take care of me. I was all alone.
I was alone in our little house until 11am the next morning when my mother’s parents, Paddy and Elizabeth Farrell, came to get me. My nappy was full, and I was standing in my cot, screaming and beating my little head against the bars as if I knew something terrible had happened.
Francis’ body was identified and released to the family for burial first. After several days, so was Maureen’s body, even though it was difficult to identify her. The coroner relied on the fact that that she had broken a hip as a young girl. Maureen had thought she was pregnant, but we were never able to know.
After losing her daughter, Maureen’s mother, Elizabeth, was broken. She had a sudden heart attack four weeks after the fire, dying at only 54 years old. Her heart broke.
Francis’s mother, Lally, was crying day in, day out. Like Maureen’s mother, she was in her mid-fifties and had raised her family. Now, when she must have been looking forward to some reduction in responsibilities, she was faced with having to raise me, her son’s daughter.
Without my Mammy and Daddy, I was an inconsolable infant. Night after night, I cried, and she had to come to me. "The only good thing about it", she said when she told me about it later, was that it took her mind off thinking about how her son had suffered in the fire. "The fire used to go round and round in my head", she said, "and I was tormented with the thought of the pain he had been in. At least when you were screaming, I couldn’t think about it."
Whenever my grandmother hugged me, it broke her heart, and she would just start crying. So, I just started going into myself at that stage and I decided then that I was just going to be around her, and not look at her. Because when I looked at her, she cried.
She wore my father’s wedding ring on a chain around her neck for years, before giving it to me.
For her husband, Robin, the loss of his son, Francis, became a source of festering anger. I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.
I remember starting school and kicking the legs off the teacher because I just did not want to be there, or anywhere. My grandmother took me by the hands in the corridor and told me "you’re a big girl now, you have to go to school, you’re going to be okay" and I kept looking up at her saying "when is my mam and dad coming?". She said "they are gone to heaven, and they won’t be back.". It was right on that school corridor that I realised that was it. Because if they were ever coming back, it would have been today. The day I was starting school. They had to be back at that stage.
Part of me died and I was never normal, whatever that is. My heart was broken. After my grandparents died, there were times I felt "I’m done" and "I can’t go on". I have a wound that has never healed. Life was just too hard to cope with.
I have sometimes allowed myself to feel angry at my Dad for going back into the flames for my Mam.
Conclusion
There is every reason to assume that, if Maureen and Francis hadn’t gone on that rare night out, they would have had happy, productive lives, filled with the children Maureen longed for, and the fulfilling work life, with colleagues and banter, that Francis had such talent for.
Anyone from Dublin knows that if the disco had been in an affluent Southside suburb, rather than a working-class area of the Northside, the victims would not have been blamed for their own deaths. The allegation of arson added insult to injury.
I have always wondered what my parents’ last thoughts might have been and what happened to them in their final few minutes on Earth. I wonder about them suffering. I wonder whether Francis, my dad, ever reached Maureen, my Mam, or whether he died without finding her. I wonder whether they realised that their lives were about to end. I wonder whether they tried to comfort one another before it was too late. I wonder if they thought about their baby girl.
I am hopeful that, all these years after they were killed in the Stardust, they will finally get the justice that they deserve.
