Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the speakers. The discussion has been fascinating. I am not a member of the Joint Committee on Justice so I am learning a lot sitting here. I am here particularly to raise the issue of the Stardust inquest, which is coming up, we hope, in September. Professor Cusack was involved in writing the report in 2000, which stated that the Coroner Service is a service for the living and should serve to reassure society as a whole. That is where I am coming from in the context of the Stardust and the jury selection. The initial inquest that took place was considered by Professor Scraton to be an abject failure. There followed a judicial inquiry, which concluded with the finding of probable arson. That stood on the public record for 28 years, so an entire community was tarred with the possibility that it was one of their own who caused the fire and the 48 deaths. The idea of an inquest is not only to get answers for the relatives but also, as a society, to be able to learn and to try to prevent this from happening to any other family in the future. The fact that we in the Stardust campaign were able to collect 48,000 signatures in a matter of weeks shows not only the public interest in this issue but also the public awareness that this is an unclosed event in Irish society and that the families deserve answers to what happened to their loved ones that night.

I was concerned to hear Professor Cusack speak of the right to a jury. Seeing things from the perspective of these families, they had the first inquest, which involved a coroner. All they were told was that their loved ones died of smoke inhalation and that was it. There was nothing about the context as to how they inhaled the smoke. Then there was the judicial inquiry, which was judge-led. The families are now expected to go into a new inquest and, if they are not to have a jury, to have blind faith that things have changed and that they will get the answers they did not get 41 years ago.

While I have an interest in this because I brought forward a Bill on the matter, I do not care if it is done by my Bill, by the Minister's or by regulation. The right to have one's peers hear what happened is a really important issue. I am glad the ICCL has called for this to be resolved because we have an issue with reform of the coronial system, and all of that has to happen. We also face a deadline of September. The Dáil is about to go into recess. If we do not have legislation of some form to allow for independent jury selection, the inquest will not begin in September. It just will not happen. It also sends out a message internationally that we think it is appropriate that the Garda select the jury or that there be no jury in an inquest in which the Garda will have questions to answer as to how it preserved the site on the night of the fire. On foot of that, I am here to lobby on behalf of the families of the Stardust and for their right to an independently selected jury.