Stardust manager Eamon Butterly: For many families, last year was the first time they heard him speak

The manager of the Stardust, which was owned by his father Patrick, effectively disappeared from public view in June 1983 after the Butterly family were awarded damages, having argued that the fire was started deliberately.

Eighteen months previously, at the November 1981 trial into the most devastating fire tragedy in the State’s history, Justice Ronan Keane sided with the Butterlys’ argument and ruled that the cause of the fire was probable arson.

Grieving families fiercely disputed this, but the ruling stood and it meant that they could not sue the Butterlys for alleged negligence.

Instead, Eamon and Patrick Butterly were awarded damages of £581,000 having sought compensation of £3m. To put the enormity of those figures into context, the average price of a three-bedroom home in Dublin in the early 1980s was €35,000.

The awarding of this huge sum coupled with a sense that the families of the victims had not received justice led to considerable ill feeling towards Eamon Butterly. In such an environment, it’s little surprise that he didn’t put his head above the parapet.

And yet, he had no compunction about putting his name to the building complex that replaced the Stardust. For many years, Butterly Business Park was emblazoned above the door, right where the Stardust logo had been. The facade survived the fire and is the only part of the original building that survives today.

The big sign proclaiming Butterly Business Park is gone now, as the complex is under new ownership, but this week, those words could still be found printed on some of the window panes. It is worth noting that in December 2004, during the height of the Celtic Tiger, accounts for Butterly Business Park Ltd, the group’s holding company, showed it had assets worth €10.9m.

Butterly, now 79, cut a frail, but defiant figure when under cross-examination at the Stardust inquest at the Pillar Room of the Rotunda Hospital last autumn. Sometimes, his voice could barely be heard by reporters on duty, but he was unequivocal in his assertion that the fire was started maliciously.

For a figure at the centre of an event as devastating as the Stardust fire, a seismic event that has long held a place in the collective imagination, very little is known of Butterly himself.

One journalist who covered the story in 1981 says even then very little was known about Butterly. “That family really kept themselves to themselves. They would have been well known in Malahide, although I think Eamon was living in the Beaumont/Artane area at the time of the fire,” they said.

His roots are in Malahide, north Co Dublin. His father Patrick was a successful businessman, who made most of his money in bricks. Born in 1919, Patrick Butterly was part of the so-called mohair suit generation – upwardly mobile young men in the late 1950s and early 1960s whose entrepreneurial endeavours seemed to chime with the optimism of then taoiseach Seán Lemass. He even wrote a book about his achievements which he gave to family and friends. Its title was From Radishes to Riches.

Patrick Butterly soon got to know another going-places-fast north-side Dubliner, Charles Haughey, and in the late 1960s then taoiseach Jack Lynch invited him to join Fianna Fáil’s fundraising arm, Taca. “We were all Fianna Fáilers,” he wrote in his memoir.

For many years, he ran the Scott’s jam-making factory at Artane. The premises lay empty for a time and it was his son Eamon who had the idea to convert the vast facility into a pub, lounge and nightclub – with the latter also doubling as a concert venue. Aerial photos in the wake of the fire demonstrated just how huge the complex was then.

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In the early 1980s, Dublin’s entertainment and gig venues tended to be located in suburban areas. The Top Hat in Dún Laoghaire was a very popular venue on the southside of the city.

Artane and Coolock were suburbs with a large proportion of young people and as soon as the Stardust first opened in early 1978, the punters soon started to flood in.

Although he has never publicly explained how he got the name, it may have been borrowed from the title of a popular Willie Nelson album which was released that year.

Initially, the focus was on gigs from the likes of the embryonic U2 and their Dublin rivals The Blades, but with the disco craze sweeping across the world, then 33-year-old Eamon Butterly was keen to get a slice of the action.

At the peak of its popularity, the Stardust would welcome hundreds of people. In fact, on that tragic Valentine’s weekend night in 1981, 800 patrons were present and many others had been turned away.

It appears that Butterly had no experience in showbiz or entertainment, although with intense demand for discos, he must have seen the enterprise as a licence to print money.

When it came to decorating the place, he opted for cheap materials, including the carpet tiles which were used on the walls. Butterly claimed that these were not in breach of fire-safety protocols, but officials from Dublin Corporation had deemed them to be a fire hazard. Expert reports from fire-safety officers afterwards confirmed that the fire likely spread much faster as a result of the tiles.

A particular Butterly bugbear was how many people were getting into the Stardust for free. As there were several doors to the premises, he discovered that some already inside were simply opening doors for their friends to gain entry. Rather than employ enough security guards to police each exit door, a policy of draping chains over them – to give the impression that they were locked – was enacted.

At the inquest last autumn, Butterly appeared to pin the blame for the policy on deceased head doorman Tom Keenan. The pair were related by marriage: Keenan was Butterly’s father’s brother-in-law. Denying that he was throwing his uncle “under the bus”, he insisted that Keenan had told him it was standard practice to lock exit doors and he claimed that it was the doorman who locked them of his own volition.

One of the door staff who gave evidence at the inquest claimed that Butterly was “a tough man and very volatile” who “hired and fired” him three times. “I don’t recall that,” Butterly said. “The person who was hiring the doormen was Mr Keenan.”

In the wake of the fire, many of the victims’ families were upset that Butterly offered no apology and his decision to remain silent was perceived as grossly insensitive.

For many who had campaigned for more than four decades, the first time they ever heard Butterly speak was at the inquest last year.