Introduction
Paul was my younger brother by three years. There were five boys, and our mother and father. Paul was a twin to his brother Liam. I'm three years older than the twins.
Background
Paul was a very funny little lad. He was very outgoing. Of all of us, he was the most outgoing and the one with the most friends. He was a people-person. He was a great chatter and was really good at chatting to girls.
We always went on holidays to Kilkee and very few people from Dublin go there: it’s mostly people from Cork and Limerick. On the second day of the holidays my mother would be in the kitchen and would turn around to see him with a fella from Cork who he’d already made fast friends with. He was a hard lad to dislike.
We had our fights, but you couldn’t stay mad at him for long. He was a good lad. If you met his twin brother, they are like chalk and cheese. They didn’t look like each other or behave like each other, they fought like cats and dogs. But if you fought one of them you fought the two of them because they’d have each other’s back.
Paul got along very well with our mother. Even when Paul got into a bit of bother, you couldn’t stay mad at him.
The rest of us are so private and we really don’t go out much, but I just know Paul would have been the social focus of our family. He was only 17 when he died, so it’s really hard to remember him at times. If all my brothers were sitting here, then we’d share more memories but sometimes I can only remember a few instances.
Paul pleaded with his Mam and Dad, that year, to let him leave school when he’d just turned 17. They told him he couldn’t leave school until he got a job. He got a job in a famous Clontarf pub called Harry Burns’, as an apprentice barman, and then he jacked in the job after 2 weeks because he missed hanging about with his friends. He hadn’t a clue what he wanted to do, he was that young.
All the family were big into swimming. Every Sunday, in the Summer, Mam and Dad would take us to Howth and we’d be there from lunchtime to teatime. You’d see the tide come in and go out as you’d be there for hours.
He would also partake in local football. In those days, you didn’t have a huge amount of facilities so you hung around with your mates all the time.
I was with Paul that night. Me and him and two girls from Derry. He had just started going out with a girl called Susie Morgan from Derry. They’d only been going out for a number of weeks, so he was excited. I was going out with one of her friends, Finola. We were there as a double date. That’s my last memory of him.
The four of us went in together.
As far as I know, when the fire started or at least when I became aware of it, there was a slow set on. Finola and I were dancing on the floor, but Paul and Susie were way back up in the seats. That is probably the reason I got out, because we were near the exit doors.
After the Stardust Fire
I couldn’t find Paul and Susie but there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, and we lived a 5-minute walk from the Stardust, so I went with Finola down to the house to see if they turned up there. They didn’t.
My mother was there, she had cancer at that stage and was lying asleep on the sofa. So we told her there had been a fire and we didn’t know where Paul and Susie were. I had a motorbike then so I hopped on the motorbike. We turned on radios and heard that lots of people were taken to hospital, but we didn’t know people had died. It was a very scary time. We drove off into Dublin going around the hospitals where we saw lots of people, we knew around the hospitals with burns but we couldn’t find Paul or Susie.
Mam had no car or anything like that. She woke up our Dad and they stayed at home waiting for news. I think, even at that stage, we didn’t have a phone in the house so when anything happened then one person nearly always stayed in the house. I’d two other brothers who had motorbikes. So, the three of us (Liam and Harry) were driving around Dublin checking all the wards of the hospitals. We walked through I don’t know many wards.
I don’t really know when it dawned on us. I suppose early morning you start hearing people had died and you start to think, God maybe they were some of the ones who died because they couldn’t find them. There were hundreds in hospital as well as the people who died.
Then we started figuring that he probably is dead. I remember me and one of my mates went into the morgue in Store Street in Dublin. You know that big Bus Áras? Right opposite that. We went in and we saw one or two bodies but couldn’t recognise him. Because he was 17, he’d no tattoos and had perfect teeth. There were no dental records. He ended up being one of the 7 unidentified.
I don’t know when his death was confirmed but they would probably have told my parents that he was dead.
We were at the funeral for all the unidentified. They’d a funeral mass. From the time after the Stardust happened, we spent every second day going to funerals. Sometimes one in the morning and one at lunchtime. If you didn’t know all of them, you knew a good few; and if you didn’t know them directly, then you knew their siblings etc. There was a huge turnout because there were seven of them and all the friends wanted to go.
Not being allowed to have a headstone for seven years upset my mother bigtime. You had to wait until they were classified dead.
Liam was contacted in 2007 to give a DNA sample, and then they had another funeral mass or something because my brother came back from England and my other brother came back from Australia. We were all out at the graveyard when he was re-interred. It was a bit surreal because we are standing there, me and all my brothers in our 40s then, but he is forever 17 and it was all those years later. The mother and the father were dead at that stage, but I know it had really upset my Dad that they couldn’t get him identified. My Mam and Dad are buried out in Sutton cemetery along the same row of graves.
Since then
It had an awful effect on the parents, definitely. My mother was a very religious woman who used to go to Mass every day. To be honest, she just went completely downhill after Paul died. It
hit her so hard. She lost the will to put up any fight with the cancer and she stopped going to Mass: she kind of lost her faith. She got great solace from her faith with the cancer diagnosis, initially. It’s very wrong when the child dies before the parent.
My Dad was gutted as well. He tried and tried to get answers. He wrote to politicians because he was very, very, annoyed. He went to all the meetings they would have had about it and attended the first tribunal. My Da wrote to TDs, and European officials in Strasbourg. That’s the way he approached it. He tried to get answers and he went to his grave cursing what happened. It really upset my father.
My mother died in 1983 and only lasted 2 years after Paul died. My father didn’t die until he was almost 85. They were both gone before Paul was officially identified.
I thought about what things were like for us at the time, but life had to go on. We didn’t have big emotional displays: you just had to get on with things. We tried not to let it take over our lives. We weren’t the only ones, as there were families which suffered even more loss.
While we were gutted that our brother died, if you were around Artane and the Coolock area afterwards a lot of people had lost people. We were all late teens, early 20s, and you just went to the pubs with your mates, but when you would go into the pubs around Artane, people were crying all the time. Half the time you’d end up going into the city centre to get away from it all.
After my brother, Paul, died, I cried once, a week later, in front of one of my mates. We didn’t have counsellors. We knew no better. You just got on with it. Especially boys. Therapists were for Americans on the TV.
I think Paul would have been a favourite uncle. The one that organised all the fun stuff. Especially family holidays. I’m not a big one for saying things like "today is Paul’s birthday" but you think of him at Christmas and when you’re on holiday. We go away on holiday together sometimes. He probably would have had kids of his own and he never got to meet his nephews and nieces. Two nieces and 5 nephews. He never got to meet them, and they never got to meet him. That’s when I would think about him. He was a great communicator.
Conclusion
I worked in the civil service all my life and I would say I worked in some offices for ten or fifteen years and they wouldn’t have known I’d a brother who died in the
Stardust.
I’ve a 21year old son, a 20-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter. We don’t really talk about it hugely. We have some pictures of Paul around the house. You have to try to live on. Some people lost their own lives that night because their loved ones being killed in the Stardust has consumed them. I don’t know if we made a conscious effort to avoid that or not.
My family and I loved Paul and we really miss him
