Stardust And Kingsmill

Anthony McIntyre ☠ The families of the Stardust victims finally got revelatory justice after a 43 year campaign.

A Dublin inquest found that the forty eight young people who lost their lives at a Valentine's night disco in 1981 were unlawfully killed.

It was a verdict that upended decades of obfuscation and evasiveness by the organs of the state.

In 1981, because of the blanket protest, with no access to television, radio or newspapers, our understanding of the disaster was limited, its impact much less striking than the Hillsborough tragedy eight years later to which we had immediate exposure via a number of media outlets.

We were held in H6 at the time of Stardust, a block isolated from the section of the prison where the other three protest blocks were situated. The rudimentary inter-block news feed was not even available to H6. We could not shout news over to the other blocks in the quietude of the evenings nor could they shout it to us. News filtered in via visits and then only in snippets. By the time Bobby embarked on his hunger strike two weeks later our minds were focussed on other things.

The Dublin government has now issued an apology to the families for its role in either hindering or not facilitating the search for truth."We failed you when you needed us the most', the contrite words of Taoiseach Simon Harris, not yet born at the time of the tragedy, echoed through the Dail.

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein leader, welcomed the inquest findings. She repeated her charge that the state had been guilty of a big lie. That lie was that the fire was the result of arson, which it most certainly was not.

It was a lie repeated over and over . . . It was a lie that devastated families and further traumatised survivors. To this day those families and survivors still ask who crafted that lie? Who spun it, who spread it and why? What was their motive? And who were they protecting? Forty-three years on and they still don’t have the answer to those questions.

These are fine points for any political leader to make, and more leaders should be expressing the same type of concern. But such words lose their value if made more for point scoring against political opponents rather than as a genuine and passionate commitment to transparency in matters of injustice.

While McDonald was absolutely right to make noise about the Stardust lies, it was her silence around the other big lie highlighted at an earlier inquest that will for many denude her concerns of authenticity.

The Kingsmill inquest found that the big lie was that the South Armagh Republican Action Force and not the IRA was responsible for the 1976 massacre of ten Protestant workmen. Forty eight years after that big lie it has still not been cast aside and replaced with the truth by the organisation responsible. Mary Lou McDonald could easily repeat the above questions she asked of Stardust, merely changing the number of years to adjust to the length of time the Kingsmill lie has been in existence: forty eight years instead of forty three.

It was a lie repeated over and over . . . It was a lie that devastated families and further traumatised survivors. To this day those families and survivors still ask who crafted that lie? Who spun it, who spread it and why? What was their motive? And who were they protecting? Forty-eight years on and they still don’t have the answer to those questions.

Mary Lou McDonald is in a position to do as the Kingsmill coroner suggested. While she bears absolutely no culpability for the massacre, in the wake of her statement on the Stardust tragedy she has a responsibility to put the same questions to those who led the IRA that she has put to the Dublin government. And she can categorically state that itself alone, the IRA, was the author of the premediated sectarian massacre.

It is not a lot for Mary Lou McDonald to give. It will be a lot for the families of those killed in Kingsmill to get.

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