A jury has been selected and sworn in for the biggest inquest in the history of the State which begins hearing evidence next Tuesday.
The Stardust Inquest will examine the events in the early hours of Valentines Day 1981 when 48 people lost their lives in a fire in the Stardust Ballroom in Artane in north Dublin.
The Dublin City Coroner selected 15 jurors and a number of reserve jurors for the inquest which will begin at 11am on 25 April.
Dr Myra Cullinane said the inquest will sit Tuesday to Friday, between 11am and 4pm each day.
She said the pen portraits of the 48 victims will open proceedings and will take about 3 weeks to deliver and after that evidence will be heard.
Dr Cullinane asked jurors to refrain from researching the facts of the case or discussing it with anyone connected with the case.
She said sitting on the juries for these inquests was a very important task for the families involved.
Around 50 family members of the 48 people who died in fire in the Stardust Ballroom in the early hours of St Valentine's Day in 1981 attended the empanelling process.
They arrived together down Jones Road behind a banner and described today as "momentous".
Jury selection for the biggest inquest in the history of the state gets underway this morning. Families of the victims of the Stardust have described it as a momentous day @rtenews pic.twitter.com/39YmZynqFd
— Samantha Libreri (@SamanthaLibreri) April 17, 2023
Siobhan Dunne's 28-year-old brother Liam died following the blaze, on 11 March 1982, the last victim of the tragedy.
"It was horrendous," Ms Dunne said.
"We all died that day, our family has never been the same since, it devastated our family."
She said the the fact that the inquest process was finally getting under way was a huge relief for families
"For the family, it's like someone took their foot off our chest and we're going forward and by this time next year please God we'll be able to put this to rest with justice being done," Ms Dunne added.
Maurice McHugh and his wife Phyllis lost their only daughter Caroline in the blaze, who was 17.
The couple, who are now in their 80s, said it has been a long road to getting the inquest established.
"Several times we felt like giving up but we kept battling on just to get the truth and maybe at the end of the day to know exactly what happened on the night," Mr McHugh said.
"It's been a battle the last 42 years but we never gave up even though we've been knocked back many times by different parties, everything put on the long, long finger.
"Caroline was 17 years of age at the time. We were invited to a wedding in Manchester and Caroline didn't want to go to the wedding, she wanted to go to the dance instead, to the competition.
"So a very good friend of ours said she'd look after her, so we were away when the disaster happened.
"Caroline couldn't be identified by her appearance. The only way we could identify her was that Phyllis remembered that she complained about a toothache and she had a small aperture on one of her teeth at the back and that was the only way she could be identified at the time."
Lisa Lawlor was a baby when her parents, Frances and Maureen Lawlor, perished in the blaze.
"Growing up with no parents, all the milestones I've never had with them," Ms Lawlor said.
"My father came out of the fire and he went back in and that's what happened to him.
"We've waited so long for today so I'm really really honoured to be here. I grew up in the shadow of this disaster because before I could walk or talk it was Stardust."
Daragh Mackin, a solicitor with Phoenix Law, is representing the majority of families and said the empanelling of the jury was a landmark day.
"This is a momentous day for the families it's been a very, very long road," Mr Mackin said.
"It's a pretty surreal time, here we are at Croke Park with the jury being sworn after a long campaign for truth and justice.
"This is the largest every inquest in the history of the State. It's likely on any estimation that this inquest will last at least six months. The reality is there hasn't been a bigger investigation of this kind in recent history.
"It's difficult to see an inquest of this size ever happening again. So the reality is while six months may seem a long time, it's relatively short time given how long these families have waited and in comparison to the complexity of the case."
He said a large number of people were summonsed for jury selection due to the unique nature of these hearings.
"The reality is that there's not many people in Dublin who don't know about the Stardust fire, given the complexity, the backdrop, the history," Mr Mackin added.
