The only orphan of the Stardust fire says the families of victims can never move on until they know what happened.
Lisa Lawlor – known as the Stardust baby since her parents Maureen and Francis lost their lives in the inferno – hopes the inquiry will finally bring closure for those left behind.
Lisa, 43, said: “We need to know what happened and maybe then we can get closure. Until we know, we can’t.
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“It’s a simple question. But it’s taken 43 years to get the answer.
“Nothing has healed. When we find out the whys and the hows, we can then say: OK.”
The mother-of-four from Swords in Dublin will read out her pen portrait of her lost parents at the Stardust inquest tomorrow.
She is the only child of the 48 victims of the Valentine’s Night fire disaster in the ballroom in Dublin’s Artane in 1981.
It remains the worst fire disaster in the history of the State.
Francis, 25, initially escaped the blaze, but died when he went back in to try and rescue Maureen, 23. Little Lisa was 17 months old at the time.
She told the Irish Mirror: “I feel different to the other families who have lost siblings and sons and daughters, because I am different. I’m completely alone in this world. Sometimes I feel overlooked. I feel on the outside. I lost everything. I used to try and prove it.
“I am the only one who lost parents. There’s only one of me. I have no years to look back on – for me, it’s the times I lost with my mother and father.
“I have no memories. I’ve never seen my mother and father walk, I’ve never heard their voices.
“I try to create memories from what everyone else tells me.”
She said that when she was a small girl, she clung on to the hope that her mum might one day walk in the door.
Lisa added: “When I was around five I started thinking, ‘She’s going to knock at the door one day and say: ‘I’m home. It’s all been a big mistake. It never happened.’
“I still think that sometimes. That kept me alive for a long time. That thought, ‘She’s coming back’.
“It was all too bad and too big to have happened.”
She said she has fought with her father in her mind, for going back into the flames to try to save her mum.
Lisa added: “He got out of it, and went back in. He could have taken the easy way out and run. But he went back to get my mam and that was the end of the two of them.
“I commend him. He’s a hero. But there have been times where I think: ‘Why didn’t you come home to me? You could have come home to me.’”
He forgot his wedding ring that night and Lisa still wears it every day.
Maureen – an anxious new mother – was reluctant to leave Lisa and had to be convinced to go out that night.
Francis said it would be a night for a bit of fun and dancing and they’d be back home to the baby in a few hours.
The Lawlors got a babysitter that night to get to the dance in the local ballroom. When the young girl who was hired to mind Lisa heard the news coming through, she fled in panic.
Lisa was left alone until 11am the next day when she was found in her cot, screaming.
She was raised by her paternal grandmother Lally Lawlor, who tried to compensate for the loss by smothering her with love and buying her toys.
But in the background, she too was destroyed by grief over her son’s death.
In her pen portrait, Lisa will tell how she would hear the cries of agony of her grandmother at night.
She said: “Granny would throw me out in front of the camera in a frilly dress and say, ‘Smile’ while she was bawling her eyes out in the corner.
“I got all the toys I liked, the dolls that laugh, the dolls that cry. I never heard the word no in my life.
“I had it all – but I had nothing. I had no siblings. The rug was pulled from under my feet at 17 months and I never stood up again. I never recovered. I am still suffering to this hour and I am 44 in August.
“Growing up, they’d would say, ‘Ah there’s Lisa, God help her, the Stardust baby. At one stage, I thought ‘God help her’ was part of my name.
“I became this poster person for the tragedy. People see me and say, ‘that’s her’ in hushed tones. It’s so tragic, it can’t be spoken out loud.”
Lisa wrote the story of her extraordinary life in her 2021 memoir Stardust Baby, which told how the fire disaster left a legacy of tragedy, hardship, addiction, abuse and mental illness. She hopes the inquest –which started at the end of last month and is at the halfway point – will establish what happened.
A tribunal the year after the fire, chaired by Justice Ronan Keane, was labelled flawed and contested by the victims’ families.
He concluded the cause was “probably arson” effectively exonerating the nightclub of fault.
He also accused Stardust’s management of acting “with reckless disregard for safety” but no criminal charges resulted.
In 2009, an independent exam into the tribunal found there was no evidence to support Keane’s finding of arson.
After a long campaign by the families, in 2019, the attorney general directed fresh inquests to take place, as there was “an insufficiency of inquiry as to how the deaths occurred.”
So far, it has heard the family testimonies of Mary and Martina Keegan, who were 19 and 16, Robert Kelly, 17, Bobby Hillick, 20, Mary Kennedy, 17, Michael Barrett, 17 and Carol Bissett, 18.
They continue next week in the Coroners’ Court, sitting in Dublin’s Rotunda.
Lisa added: “I grew up in the shadow of this disaster.
“I tried to kill myself twice in my teenage years. I screamed into my pillow night after night.
“I was small and frightened, frozen in terror at the top of the stairs at age four, listening to her [grandmother’s] wails.
“Not knowing what happened is almost worse than the death itself.”
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