Mick Clifford: An agonising path to unwind injustice

Their trauma has never been properly processed as a result. Years in which they might have been attempting to get on with living were held in suspension as they fought against the state to recognise that an injustice had been done. As with other cases of injustice that have arisen in recent years, it might well be asked why it had to take so long, why so many people had to be re-traumatised through the failure of the state to revisit a case that was crying out for further examination.

The tribunal that found as a fact what occurred sat for its first public session twelve days after the fire. That is a situation that is impossible to envisage happening today in the awful event that something similar were to occur. It concluded in November that year with the ruling that the fire was “probably” started by arson. The ruling exonerated the owner of the building, Eamon Butterly, from culpability. The tribunal did, however, include scathing criticism of some of the fire safety practices that were deployed by the owner and management of the Stardust building. It also prompted a whole rethink in the area of fire safety and led to the establishment of a new code in buildings for fire safety that persists today.

The chair of the inquiry was Judge Ronan Keane, a man who had a reputation for being a diligent and fair jurist. But his conclusion that the fire was “probably started deliberately” was ill-judged. 

Apart from anything else, it cast a cloud over the community from which those who attended a disco that night were drawn

Culpability, the official report inferred, lay within the community, probably even among the dead. That was considered an insult by the bereaved, a stain that had to be erased. Closure could not be reached until a fuller picture was established. But why did it take half a natural lifespan to rectify it?

A review of the tribunal report was finally commissioned by the government in 2008. It concluded that Keane “did not reveal any evidence to support its conclusion that the fire was started deliberately” and as such the finding “was deemed to only be a hypothesis”. That was a startling result, but even more startling was that it would be another fifteen years before a way could be found to begin a fresh dig for the truth.

Kerry babies

This long fingering by the state of an obvious wrong is not unique to the Stardust families. It took 36 years for the state to apologise to Joanna Hayes for her treatment in the course of the Kerry babies case. A tribunal in 1985 ruled that she had choked her baby to stop it crying, despite the inability of the pathologist to determine a cause of death. 

The chair, Judge Kevin Lynch, rejected claims by the family that the gardaí had used harassment and physical intimidation to obtain false confessions through coercion. This is despite the fact that false confessions were obtained from Joanne and her siblings to the effect that they had participated in the violent murder of a baby and disposal of the body.

The judge’s approach was summed up in how he considered whether the gardaí, agents of the state, who had obtained the false confessions, were lying.

“They are not barefaced lies on the part of the gardaí (as regrettably is the case with members of the Hayes family) but they are an exaggeration over and above the true position, or a gilding of the lily, or wishful thinking elevated to the status of hard fact.”

The Hayes family were entirely innocent, their treatment in custody highly suspect, yet this was the conclusion of the judge.

Like the Stardust case, it became obvious early on that there was something seriously amiss with the outcome of the inquiry. But once it was done, it was set in stone. And thereafter the state and its agents hid behind the official findings of fact, irrespective of how perverse were the findings.

Another case of a lifetime spent trying to right a wrong was that of Martin Conmey. He received a miscarriage of justice certificate in 2016 over a conviction for manslaughter in 1972. He served three years in prison for killing a neighbour, Una Lynksey, whose death was followed by a “revenge” killing of a friend of Conmey’s, Martin Kerrigan, who was also innocent.

 Again, it was obvious at the time that the basis for the conviction was seriously deficient

 When the verdict at Conmey’s trial was brought in, at 2.35am, one of the lawyers couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I am totally disinterested in such a ludicrous verdict,” he is recorded as saying in a reaction that you are unlikely to ever hear from a counsel. Conmey had to wait 44 years before his name was cleared.

Errors are made in official inquiries, judicial tribunals, or courts, just as is the case in every other walk of life. Findings of fact can be subject to various pressures, mores of the day, unconscious, or even class prejudices. These things happen, nearly always in the absence of malice. But unwinding an injustice can result in a long, torturous process that eats up decades of living, piling on stress, ensuring that victims are not allowed to move past a life-altering event.

There needs to be full and proper recognition of how much living it costs victims to get to the point where the state recognises that a terrible injustice occurred. In too many cases wronged citizens or their bereaved loves ones have been ill-served by a system in which the state has to be dragged for decades to a point where it holds up its hands and says sorry.