Kettle's Boyled: Doing the right thing after 43 years
The emergency was a fire in the Stardust Nightclub. Blackie was worried, his seventeen-year old daughter Donna was at the disco.
In 1981, in what now seems a lifetime ago, I clocked in for a night shift in a Dublin power station. It was Valentine’s night, a Saturday, and we looked forward to a quiet night. The evening shift had shut down all the turbines except one, with the others on ‘barring,’ slowly turned by electric motors to prevent uneven cooling and sagging of the main turbine shafts.
One of the men working that night was ‘Blackie’ Mahon, a genial, pleasant man who pulled his weight and got on well with everybody. He was working an overtime shift, covering somebody else’s absence. The station was quiet, with the atmosphere relaxed in comparison to the normal rush as we just monitored the equipment and ensured everything was running as it should.
That all changed sometime in the early hours, when the phone rang in the control room. The call was from Central Control, activating the Dublin Disaster Plan. The plan was designed to trigger in the event of a major incident, like a train crash, a multiple vehicle accident or a bomb blast. Part of the plan involved ensuring that there was plenty of reserve power on the grid for hospitals, and we were told to bring on more generating capacity straight away.
We fired up the huge boilers, and soon the quietness was replaced by the deafening roar of the giant turbines. Then we got more information, the emergency was a fire in the Stardust Nightclub. Blackie was worried, his seventeen-year old daughter Donna was at the disco. We didn’t know what to say, we reassured him that she was probably safe, but at that stage we had no idea of the severity of the fire. That became clearer as we approached the morning, and the engineer in charge sent Blackie home early.
I still feel a shudder when I think of the Stardust fire, but it was good to see the government’s belated apology last week, a big improvement on the attitude of the government in 1981.
Putting the record straight is all too late for Donna Mahon and the other victims. Her grave in Sutton Cemetery is close to that of my mother-in-law, and I always pause there when I pass and remember her and all the victims. I can still see Blackie’s anxious face as he stood in the control room, the concern of a loving father for a beautiful young daughter. May they both rest in peace.
