A survivor of the Stardust fire who lost her husband in the blaze has told an inquest jury of the moment she saw the roof of the nightclub collapse and knew her husband was dead.
“I will never forget that night,” said Marie Hogan, whose husband Eugene ‘Hughie’ Hogan (24) was one of the 48 people killed when the fire swept through the Stardust in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, 1981.
The jury heard that the couple and their two children were due to move to Kerry the day after the fire, for Eugene to start work with Ms Hogan’s father as a cabinet maker.
Statement
Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane said that Ms Hogan did not make a statement at the time as she lost her husband, so the statement that Ms Hogan made on April 1st 2023, was read into the record by the registrar in the Dublin District Coroner’s Court.
Ms Hogan said that when she was on the dance floor, she could smell something that was like someone cooking. Someone said there was a fire, and when she looked at where she had previously been sitting, she saw fire climbing up the curtains.
She said the fire was moving fast and people started to panic.
She said that Eugene told her to wait while he went to get the coats and, as he was going up the stairs, the lights went out.
“I was pushed with the crowd, and everyone went to a door that had an exit sign on it. There was a push bar to open the door, but it didn’t open, there was something in the middle of these double doors that was stopping it from opening,” she said.
She said that the room started to fill up with smoke, and she was pushed towards a smaller door, but it would not open either.
She said someone was banging the door, which eventually opened, and everyone tried to get out in a stampede with everyone crushed together and people falling.
“A young fella grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out. Somebody told me that Hughie was already out, but he wasn’t, he never got out,” she said.
Roof collapse
Ms Hogan said that she could not get back into the nightclub because people kept coming out of the door.
“I saw the roof collapse where we had been sitting. I knew then that Hughie was dead, because that’s where he had been,” Ms Hogan said.
She said that she later found Eugene’s brother Bernard Hogan in hospital with burns on his hands and all down his face. It was Sunday when they found Eugene, she said.
“We were only really starting off. Eugene was funny and would make me laugh. He was a hard worker, and he was mad about the kids.
"I will never forget that night, the smell when we were on the dancefloor, it was like the smell when you turn on the chip pan, like the smell of grease heating up,” said Ms Hogan.
“I’ll never forget the ceiling dripping down. It was sticking to people. You’d try to brush it off, but it was hot and sticky, and even when some people got outside, there was still smoke coming off them from the bits of ceiling stuck to them.”
In response to questioning by Mark Tottenham BL, a member of the coroner’s legal team, Ms Hogan said that what she saw dripping from the ceiling was “like Aeroboard melting”.
“I just remember the drips sticking onto people, like liquid plastic sticking to you. It was all on fire, it was burning into people, you couldn’t get it off. If you pulled it off you, you were pulling your skin off,” she said.
Doreen Desmond, who was 18 at the time, also gave evidence to the inquest.
Ms Desmond told Mr Tottenham that the fire initially looked ten feet wide, then everything happened within a matter of minutes.
“I’ve never seen anything happen with such immense quickness, it just caught flame to the ceiling. All of a sudden, I could hear screaming, there were things falling down, there was pandemonium behind me,” she said.
Liquid drops
She said that she thought she saw “polystyrene” dripping down from the ceiling.
“It was like liquid drops, it seemed like it was flammable coming down. It just happened so quickly, it raced across the ceiling,” said Ms Desmond.
“It went pitch dark, I could hear screaming, I could hear things breaking. I could hear the clambering of glasses breaking, it sounded like people scrambling over chairs and tables to get out,” she said.
Ms Desmond said that she was carried outside by the crowd and, when she got outside, she went around trying to help people on the ground and look for her friend.
“There were a lot of people lying on the ground choking. I went around to the front and there were people in the toilets with the windows broken and their hands out. There was a lot of chaos, people were trying to get them out of there because the bars were on the windows,” she said.
Ms Desmond told Des Fahy KC, representing a number of the families of the victims, that the fire spread rapidly, within a minute or two.
“It was like observing something from a distance that all of a sudden you felt was above you, and everything was collapsing down, and that was causing people to scramble on the tables,” she said.
“I put my face down, the natural thing to do, even at that I could feel it choking into me, getting into the lungs,” she said, going on to describe the smoke as thick and “very toxic”.
She described the mood of the crowd as one of “terror”, and as soon as the door opened and people went outside, everyone was collapsing on the ground. She said she could not even identify her friends as everyone had “black-sooted faces”.
“It looked like droplets coming down very quickly and flames racing across the ceiling. It looked drippy, like some kind of liquid that was coming down on top of people, and it was causing them to scream,” Ms Desmond said.
The jury also heard evidence from Joan Melia, who said that exit four was chained and locked when she arrived at it and there was a man who was kicking it but could not open it.
“It was closed and there was a lad kicking at the door. It was locked. I could see the chain on the door. There was a chain and it was locked,” she said.
The inquest continues on Thursday in the Pillar Room of the Rotunda Hospital.
