Next month will mark the 35th anniversary of the horrific fire at the Stardust nightclub in Artane, on Dublin’s northside, and the memory of that event still has a profound effect on the survivors and families of the victims.

“It’s like it only happened yesterday. When you think back, 1981, we never even got counselling. We had to go off and live with what we went through.”

These are the words of Antoinette Keegan, who spoke to Sean O’Rourke today, as part of a campaign to initiate a new enquiry into the fire at the nightclub which claimed the lives of 48 young people on St Valentine's night, February 14th, 1981.

Antoinette's experience is as harrowing as one can imagine, not just as somebody who personally suffered as a survivor, but in fact she lost two sisters in the tragedy. Speaking to Sean O’Rourke, she recalled how she found out about her sisters when she was in hospital, a few weeks after the tragedy, in the most off-the-cuff and inadvertent way.

“Then a priest came in. I don’t think the priest meant any harm by it, I don’t believe he did it out of any malice. He asked me what my name was, I told him, 'Antoinette Keegan.' He said, 'oh yeah, that’s right, your two sisters died.''

The news of her sisters had been kept from Antoinette for weeks, as doctors had instructed her parents not to tell her. The shock, they said, could be extremely detrimental to her own health, even possibly killing her. But when she finally found out, Antoinette's reaction was to “scream the hospital down”, begging to be sent home.

“While I was in there, I was having nightmares, dreams, that the fire was coming in and I’m not at home, and I'm not safe.”

The Stardust fire was the worst disaster in the history of the state. Apart from the 48 who died, another 128 people were seriously hurt. In the aftermath, a tribunal of enquiry was established, chaired by Mr Justice Ronan Keane. However, its findings were nowhere near satisfactory to the survivors and the families of those who died.

A subsequent review in 2008 by Senior Counsel Paul Coffey SC (now Mr Justice Coffey) was initiated by the then Government, but fell short of a new public enquiry demanded by the families.

Now, Independent TD Tommy Broughan, Independent TD, has tabled a private members motion to establish a Commission of Investigation into the Stardust tragedy, and the motion looks like it will be backed by super-junior minister Finian McGrath of the Independent Alliance. As a member of Government, sitting at Cabinet, this has caused tensions with the senior partners in coalition, Fine Gael, some of whom argue that, in the absence of clear new evidence, they would be willing to back a new enquiry which, they say, could cost anything up to €20 million.

Speaking after Antoinette Keegan, Daniel McConnell from the Irish Examiner discussed the potential political fallout from the private members motion. To listen to that interview, and the powerful earlier interview with Antoinette, click here.