The pain game: Families being forced to search for truth in pursuit of justice for loved ones
A loved one’s death unexpected death can haunt a family for years, or decades. And if no adequate explanation is given, or people are left searching for the truth, it can make it impossible to heal.
Failure to address systemic failures in how inquests and investigations are conducted, and the coronial system as a whole, is leading to a competition “of loudest voices, and sharpest elbows and those that campaign the longest and the hardest,” according to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL).
The council’s executive director Liam Herrick says that the Stardust inquest and the subsequent State apology is testament to the pursuit of the truth by the families involved.
On June 23, a remembrance ceremony will be held for the 48 young people who lost their lives in the February 1981 fire at the Stardust nightclub.
It follows the verdicts of unlawful killing returned in April by the jury who presided over the long-running inquest into the deaths. A State apology was made by Taoiseach Simon Harris in the Dáil the following week — just days after he met with the families after the conclusion of the inquest. Counselling has also been provided for them following the inquest.
Since then, a number of correspondences have been sent to the government by families including those of the 50 Whiddy Island disaster victims, and Adrian Moynihan who died after being restrained in a nightclub in Cork City in 2001.
“The problem of investigations getting to the truth of historical human rights violations is a very deep problem,” Mr Herrick said.
“Inquests are one dimension to it, but there are others as well. This is the difficulty with trying to address the systemic problem on a case-by-case basis; it gets into a competition of loudest voices, and sharpest elbows and those that campaign the longest and the hardest, and the Stardust victims’s families deserve huge credit for what they have done, but we cannot run a justice system on the basis of asking people to campaign for four decades. That is not an effective system.
“It makes the case where comprehensive reform is more urgent.” Department of Justice officials are currently going through submissions from organisations and individuals in response to a recent consultation process on reforming the current system.
An Oireachtas justice committee report late last year recommended a raft of changes to the coronial system, including the appointment of a chief coroner and deputy chief coroner.
“There does seem at department level to be a genuine seriousness about looking at the issue,” Mr Herrick said.
“I think though that it is also generally accepted that it is very unlikely that there would be significant progress within the lifetime of this Government, but what we would hope is that the outcome of the consultation and a clear commitment to reform would happen in the lifetime of this Government.
“We would be calling on all parties in the run-up to the general election to make a clear commitment to coroner reform.” He pointed to areas outside of inquests which also need to be addressed, citing “people who have been victims of miscarriages of justice, or mistreatment in Garda custody or at the hands of the State more generally”.
“We have a much deeper problem in Ireland about not having proper inquisitorial processes that will get to the truth of human rights violations that happened in the past,” he added.
“We have, for example, requested that the minister would carry out an investigation into what happened in the Sallins case which happened nearly 50 years ago.” The Sallins train robbery in 1976 led to the convictions of three men — two of whom were later released after an appeal, and the third was released on humanitarian grounds.
Referring to the Whiddy Island disaster, he said: “The issues there do not have a criminal justice dimension — it is just a question of people trying to get to the truth of what happened. We can see how from the Stardust how raw the death of a loved one can be even after that length of time, when you don’t have the truth. It is terribly traumatising.”
When Shane Tuohey went missing after a night out in Clara, Co Offaly in 2002, his family never envisaged that that they would still be looking for answers more than two decades later.
The 23-year-old’s body was found in the River Brosna a week after his disappearance and a subsequent inquest into his death recorded that he had drowned. Gardaí suspected he had taken his own life, but his family suspect foul play.
To this day, his family is adamant that Shane, who worked as a turf cutter, deserves a fresh inquest. A government-ordered inquiry into the handling of his death by gardaí is continuing, and is expected to report shortly.
Shane’s case featured in an online #PeaceandAnswers campaign by the ICCL in 2022, as part of a campaign seeking reform of the inquest system.
The family say there was evidence that he was assaulted before he disappeared, which was not heard at his inquest.
“Everything to date has been done behind closed doors so we are looking for what we always been looking for — a proper investigation and a new inquest,” his sister Gemma Guinan said. The inquiry into his death was announced in June 2016, after it was referred to the Government’s Independent Review Mechanism a year earlier.
It took almost another year for it to get underway when retired judge Donagh McDonagh was appointed in May 2017 to “inquire into a matter of public concern, namely the conduct and adequacy of the investigations conducted by An Garda Síochána into the death of Shane Tuohey in February 2002”.
However, retired district court judge Michael Coghlan had to be appointed to continue the work over two years ago after retired judge McDonagh informed Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, that he could not continue the inquiry for personal reasons.
Shane’s family are hurt that they have had no right to representation in the inquiry — or participation.
“It was all done behind closed doors,” she said. As they await the publication of the inquiry, Gemma says that it should not have taken 43 years for the Stardust families to secure the inquest and subsequent apology in the Dail from Taoiseach Simon Harris.
“When I hear people’s saying that it is great that the Stardust families got justice, I think ‘No, it’s not great’,” she adds.
In a statement to the the Department of Justice said: “Minister McEntee is acutely aware of the distress caused to the Tuohey family by the tragic death of Shane. In all the circumstances, it would not be appropriate to comment on the publication of Judge Coghlan’s report at this time.”
When Lily Moynihan’s son Adrian left the family home in Ballyvolane, Cork City after spending Mother’s Day together, she did not think she would never meet him again.
The 23-year-old apprentice mason left the house on Ballincollie Road to go with his friend on a night out in Cork city centre on the night of Mother’s Day, 2001. And as the night turned into a new day, a new reality dawned for Adrian’s family — that they would never again spend a day together as a family.
Now, 23 years later, Adrian’s brother Alan has been moved to seek the help of Taoiseach Simon Harris to assist the family in finding out more about how he died after being restrained at Sidetrax nightclub.
The last minutes of Adrian’s life have been seen on CCTV footage replayed time after time in the two decades since his death on March 26, 2001.
An inquest in 2003 found he had died of asphyxiation arising from the manner in which he was restrained at the club.
The jury delivered a verdict of death by misadventure, after the matter had been adjourned to allow the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) consider the opinion of State Pathologist Marie Cassidy.
The DPP, having previously considered a Garda file on the matter, decided that nobody should be prosecuted in relation to the death.
The family believe though that there should have been an option of unlawful killing as a verdict in the inquest.
“Our argument was that you are not doing justice to anyone if you don’t put it all on the table and allow a jury to make the decision. We were never happy with the misadventure verdict,” Alan says.
The decision by Alan to send correspondence to Mr Harris to seek his help followed the State apology he delivered in the Dáil to the families of the 48 victims of the Stardust fire.
“It was the wording from Simon Harris — that moment where he said ‘we should have stood with you but we stood against you’,” he explained.
“Everything that Simon Harris said resonates with us.”
In the years since Adrian’s death, the family have vigorously fought for what they see as justice for their son, with Alan seeking a review of the case.
In 2004, Adrian’s father, Andrew, went on hunger strike outside the Dáil in protest in to highlight the case.
He wanted to secure a public inquiry into Adrian’s death.
Lily also contested the 2004 European Parliament election to raise awareness of the family’s campaign for justice.
The case was one of more than 200 looked at by the seven-member Independent Review Commission to establish if it should be referred to the Garda Ombudsman Commission or to an existing commission of inquiry examining complaints by garda whistleblowers. But no action was taken.
According to gardaí, the investigation into his death remains open.
The bang of the explosion at the oil terminal on Whiddy Island in January 1979 is still felt in the weight of grief being carried by the families of the 50 victims who died as a result of it.
The tragedy unfolded at the Gulf Oil terminal on Whiddy Island in Bantry bay when the Betelgeuse tanker caught fire and exploded. A letter sent to Taoiseach Simon Harris before the Stardust apology in the Dáil by maritime lawyer Michael Kingston sought fresh inquests into the Whiddy deaths, and engagement with the families.
Two bodies buried in a graveyard in Bantry remain unidentified.
Mr Kingston is vice president of the French-Irish Association of Relatives and Friends of the Betelgeuse, the group which represents the families of those who died. His 31-year-old father Tim was among those who died.
Mr Kingston was not the only one who raised the similarities with the Whiddy disaster with the Taoiseach — so did a number of TDs in the aftermath of the apology.
Mr Harris has pledged to engage with the Attorney General in relation to the tragedy and said on April 24. “I certainly acknowledge their suffering and I think of them, the 50 people who died and the 23 bodies that were never recovered,” Mr Harris said.
“I received correspondence yesterday about this matter. I have it here in my hand and want to give that due consideration. My understanding — and it is an initial understanding because I need to be properly briefed on this — is that the Attorney General was asked to look into some matters pertaining to this. I certainly intend to talk to the Attorney General about the matter and am happy to revert to the House.”
While Michael Kingston welcomed the Stardust inquest and apology, he says that fresh inquests have been requested for some time in relation to the Whiddy deaths. He says the families “are simply being ignored, time and again”. His letter to Mr Harris said that the apology to the Stardust families “will be void of any iota of moral authority” if the State doesn’t engage in “any meaningful way” with the families of the Whiddy Island disaster.
The dead included 42 French crew, one Briton, and seven Irish men — Tim Kingston, Charlie Brennan, Denis O’Leary, Neilly O’Shea, Jimmy O’Sullivan, Liam Shanahan, and David Warner.
Twenty-three of the bodies were never recovered.
Mr Kingston, who was four years old when his father died, has been campaigning for fresh inquests into the 50 deaths for several years, after inspecting the original inquest files and finding them to be unreliable. He wrote to then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar over a year ago citing concerns that the recorded causes of death for the victims did not reference the circumstances surrounding the fatal incident, including regulatory failures.
During a tribunal of inquiry, it was found that the Betelgeuse tanker was in poor condition at the time of the Whiddy disaster, with evidence of corrosion and leaking found on the vessel. It also found that Gulf Oil and its employees had “suppressed the truth” about the events that occurred on the night.
When Lucia O’Farrell heard Taoiseach Simon Harris tell the families of the Stardust victims in the Dáil in April that the State had forced the families “to stand against us”, it rang a bell for her. She and her family have been fighting for answers at to why her son Shane was killed by a man who should have been in custody at the time.
On the evening of August 2, 2011, 23-year-old Shane O’Farrell was cycling home when he was struck by a car driven by Zigimantas Gridziuska near Carrickmacross in Co Monaghan on August 2, 2011 in a hit and run.
The following day, the Lithuanian surrendered himself to gardaí. However, the O’Farrell family feel that he should never have been at liberty to kill Shane.
On a number of occasions in the two years before the incident, he had been granted conditional bail but it had not been revoked despite broken conditions.
At the time of Shane’s death, he was on bail in connection with a number of separate incidents.
Lucia says she read the statement of apology made to the families of the Stardust victims, and she was particularly struck by the lines referencing how the State were not there for the families.
“Why didn’t someone say stop in all of that?” she asks.
“It’s enough for somebody who loses somebody in a violent manner to be able to get up in the morning and have a shower and get through the day, never mind to try and fight a system with deep pockets, unlimited resources and time. That’s not fair. That’s actually abuse.
“In our case, we want a public inquiry. We are now approaching the 13th anniversary and we know that we have hundreds of questions that have not been answered.
“One of our questions from the beginning was if he was an informer for the guards. Is that why a lenient approach was taken with him?” Two separate Gsoc examinations of different elements of the case were carried out but a public inquiry has never taken place.
A scoping exercise of the case carried out by retired judge Gerard Haughton was published last July, and a key finding was that an inquiry was unwarranted.
“The State’s approach is now that there is no need for any inquiry,” Lucia says. “That means that what happened Shane is acceptable in the eyes of the State. That can’t be right. Like with Stardust, the State’s response is that there has already been an investigation into this so that’s the end of the matter. With respect it’s not, an effective investigation is required.
“Our child should still be alive. There was a man at liberty who should have been in custody. When we start to ask questions, you are almost considered an enemy of the State.”
A statement from the Department of Justice said that the scoping inquiry laid out recommendations in relation to a number of areas, including suspended sentences, and “implementation of those recommendations has commenced, where appropriate”.
