Cabinet to agree on €500k compensation for each person killed in Stardust nightclub fire

The Cabinet is to sign off on a 24 million euro redress scheme for the families of those affected by the Stardust fire.

Forty-eight people were killed when the blaze ripped through the Dublin nightclub in 1981.

After a more than 40-year campaign for justice, an inquest in April found that the 48 victims had been unlawfully killed.

A previous finding in 1982 said that the fire had been started deliberately, a theory the families never accepted.

That ruling was dismissed in 2009, leading to the latest inquests for the victims, who were aged from 16 to 27 and mostly came from the surrounding north Dublin area.

A majority decision from the jury found the blaze, which broke out in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 1981, was instead caused by an electrical fault in the hot press of the bar.

Days after the decision, Taoiseach Simon Harris apologised to the victims, survivors and families of the tragedy, saying the State failed them.

A special Cabinet meeting was scheduled for Friday afternoon to sign off on the scheme which has been agreed with campaigners through a series of meetings.

If the overall figure is apportioned equally by the 48 people who were killed in the fire, each family may receive a redress payment of 500,000 euro for the death of their loved one.

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