Stardust Fire - Prime Time

An edition of Prime Time, RTÉ's current affairs programme, broadcast on 14 February 2006, cast doubts on some of the findings of the original tribunal. The programme produced witnesses who were outside the building on the night. Some outside saw fire coming from the roof up to eight minutes before those inside did. New evidence concerning the building's contents and layout was also presented. Important details were also shown regarding the actual location of a store room containing flammable materials and cleaning agents. The document plan of the building which the tribunal used, and which was critical to its findings, was shown to be confusingly flawed by locating the store room on the wrong level. It showed the store room to be "near the basement" When in fact there was no basement in the building and the store and lamp rooms were located in the roof space.

The list of contents of the store was not put before the inquiry and included large amounts of highly flammable and spontaneously combustible materials, mostly polishes and floor waxes, with the inquiry assuming only normal everyday items were inside.

A re-enactment of the fire suggested that it did not happen as the tribunal had found. The conclusions of the show were that the fire started in the roof space where the store room was located and had already spread across the main nightclub area before those inside were aware of it. Furthermore there were reports that the lamp room adjacent to the store had had several instances in preceding weeks of smouldering, smoking and sparking of the electrical installations within, which could conceivably have been the original ignition source. If this is true, the original finding of "probable arson" is in doubt.

Also if true, it mirrors events decades earlier in the fatal Henderson's Department Store Fire in Liverpool, where a fire strongly suspected as starting in electrical cabling rapidly spread in and across false ceiling space, hidden until it broke out ferociously across a large area.