stardust

Moving Dublin explores the everyday world of movement in Dublin and its vast sprawling suburbs spreading out west from the coastal city. We look at how far the contemporary world of the Dublin commuter has strayed from the civic realm it constituted when Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses.

Moving Dublin is to be published in the form of a book and DVD in March 2009 by Gandon Editions

Moving Dublin has been commissioned by South Dublin County Council through In Context 3 and funded under the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government’s Per Cent for Art Scheme.

A tasteless plan to reopen a pub on the site on the 25th anniversary of the fire met with fierce protest. As time goes on further injustices and slights are added to the collective memory of the tragedy, and it is becoming difficult to distinguish reality from the myth now growing up around the Stardust. In 1985 Christy Moore wrote and released a song about the tragedy, They Never Came Home, pointing to the responsibility of the owners and of the government.

All around the city the bad news it spread

There's a fire in the Stardust there's 48 dead

Hundreds of children are injured and maimed

And all just because the fire exits were chained

Our leaders were shocked, grim statements were made

They shed tears in the graveyard as the bodies were laid

The victims have waited in vain for 4 years

It seems like our leaders shed crocodile tears

The song was banned. Moore was found guilty of contempt of court and the album on which the song had been released, Ordinary Man, was recalled and re-released without the song. Article 40 of our constitution clearly guarantees freedom of expression, and the song states facts that were established in the tribunal. This was all back in the eighties: Charlie Haughey’s hair shirt policies, political corruption and mass emigration. The disco was in Haughey’s own constituency and its owner was a personal friend and supporter of the Taoiseach. The song was so charged with emotional weight that many felt it could have brought down the government. It could have been a defining moment in the public conscience of our people, similar to Emile Zola’s J’Accuse for the French. But instead it was just forgotten. Snuffed out. That was in 1985.

In 1906 James Joyce wrote a letter to a potential publisher of Dubliners, “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.”

Watch this video on

Digital Video 1080i HDV Year : 2008

Cyril Kelly settled in Drumcondra in the 1960s and remained a teacher on the north side of the city until his retirement. Cyril cycled to work, and thirty years ago his journey took him along the Kilmore road to Artane and past a nightspot called the Stardust Club. On February 14th 1981 the Stardust caught fire during a Valentines night disco. Forty-eight young people died and many more were injured. Astonishingly, the management and owners of the club, a wealthy and politically well connected family, were not held responsible in any way and were even awarded state compensation, despite the tribunals' statement that they had acted with “reckless disregard” for the safety of the clubs users. For the rest of his teaching career Cyril Kelly continued to cycle along the Kilmore road past the Stardust, on the way to the school in Artane where he taught, first past the blackened carcass of the original building, later past the vacant site, and finally past the new Butterly business park, which includes a pub, an off licence and a bookies. 27 years after the fire the community continue to feel that their loss was never fully recognised. The hurt to the community, and the impunity of the club's management, was compounded by the payment of state compensation to the owners, justified by the tribunals’ unproven finding of “probable arson”, as a cause of the fire. Over the years the memory of the Stardust tragedy in Dublin has been at the centre of a struggle for ownership. Attempts to divert the memory for possible financial gain are confronted with the victims and their families’ fierce determination to defend the memory intact and assert their possession of it.