OPINION: Investigation of disasters in Ireland and UK deeply flawed, from pyrite to Grenfell

Reading about upcoming TV programmes, I happened on this description of a documentary called ‘10 Mistakes That Sank The Titanic’:
“This intriguing documentary reveals a cascade of events, none of them fatal in their own right, but each combining to create a disastrous catalogue of errors that brought about the demise of the celebrated Titanic.”
Catastrophic events have been a feature of life since the dawn of time, and assigning blame is not always relevant. Nobody was to blame for the asteroid that crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, obliterated the dinosaurs and destroyed much else. It might have been wiser for Roman town planners to locate Pompeii further away from Mount Vesuvius, but the eruption on August 24, 79BC, which destroyed the town and its inhabitants, was an unpredictable natural event that would have been difficult to anticipate.
However, many recent disasters were easier to anticipate and entirely avoidable if the responsible people had been doing their jobs with care and attention and appropriate action had been taken.
Shocking UK and Irish examples include the Stardust fire in Dublin (1981); the Hillsborough Stadium disaster (1989); the pyrite/mica house-building debacle in Mayo and Donegal (2007); the collapse of the Irish banking system (2008); and most recently, the Grenfell Tower fire in London (2017).
Three of these events led to large-scale loss of life (Hillsborough, Stardust and Grenfell). One led to the virtual collapse of the entire Irish economy (the banking crisis). One resulted in the State being obliged to step in and award massive sums in compensation to the affected house owners (pyrite/mica).

Investigation limits
The British and Irish common law system severely restricts how such disasters can be investigated and culpability determined.
In situations where there is evidence of direct and obvious criminality (such as a bank robbery or a murder), the police can immediately step in to investigate and the State can prosecute wrongdoers in courts. However, when evidence of criminality is not immediately obvious, lengthy and costly commissions of inquiry are needed to determine the facts before any criminal or civil action can be contemplated. Such procedures can be excessively lengthy, expensive and unsatisfactory.
In the case of the Stardust fire, the first formal enquiry proved so flawed and inadequate that many additional inquiries and new inquests were needed before the causes of the disaster were finally revealed some 43 years later. After the Keane Tribunal of 1981-82 (where the fire was concluded to have been caused by arson), there followed a Compensation Tribunal (1985); the Coffey Report (2008) and the McCartan Report (2017), all of which concluded that there was no new evidence that would challenge the initial arson findings of Judge Keane in 1982. Only when new inquests were carried out was a verdict of unlawful killing delivered.
They do things differently in Europe. When the Morandi bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed on August 14, 2018, killing 43 people, a judicial inquiry got under way immediately and 58 people went on trial in 2022, accused of manslaughter and other changes. The Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini told relatives of victims that the people who plunged to their deaths were not victims of a flood or natural disaster. Rather, they were ‘victims of greed, of people who didn’t do their jobs’. Investigating magistrates in Europe have powers that we in Ireland can only dream about.
In our world of constrained public finances, sloppy safety regulations and oversight, and complex contractor and sub-contractor business dealings, responsibility for disasters can quickly become a tangled and impenetrable web of murky relationships and deniability. This was illustrated in astonishing detail in the final report of the Grenfell fire disaster, published on September 4.
The findings of Sir Martin Moore-Bick, who chaired the inquiry, were devastating. The dangers of fires due to combustible cladding had been well known 25 years before the Grenfell fire; tests that demonstrated this had been carried out by manufacturers of cladding, but results had been concealed; the ‘bonfire of red tape’ carried out by governments resulted in the neglect of necessary safety measures; the state body responsible for building standards had been privatised and had become exposed to ‘unscrupulous product manufacturers’; the Local Authority that owned Grenfell Tower was indifferent to fire safety and the needs of vulnerable residents; even the fire services had not been trained properly on high-rise buildings.

Mayo’s pyrite disaster
While, thankfully, our very own local pyrite disaster did not result in any deaths, it nevertheless resulted in a massive waste of public money (€3.65 billion to date) that was urgently needed for essential infrastructure and other social projects in the region.
The complex of relationships linking Mayo County Council, concrete-testing agencies, builders, architects and suppliers of sand are probably not as convoluted as in the Grenfell case illustrated above, and could easily have been unravelled if there had been any will and determination to do so. But the official inquiry into the pyrite/mica problem was toothless and arrived at no identification of the guilty parties or failed systems.
Were the homeowners and the tax payers ‘victims of greed, of people who didn’t do their jobs’?
The Sicilian mafia have a useful term for this situation. Omerta, a code of silence about criminal activity and a refusal to assist authorities to address malfeasance.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.