At a Valentine’s disco in 1981, a fire ripped through a north Dublin nightclub. The disaster left 48 young people dead and more than 200 injured. The Last Disco, a new book by Sean Murray, Christine Bohan (The Journal’s Deputy Editor), and Nicky Ryan (The Journal’s Senior Media Producer) explores the tragedy and the decades of fallout in forensic detail. The below is an abridged extract detailing the rise of the Butterly family’s business empire, who would go on to open the Stardust nightclub.

PATRICK BUTTERLY HAD a problem. The businessman owned a pub on George’s Quay in Dublin city centre and he’d just opened up a disco in the building at the back. This was in the late 1960s when discos were just starting out in Ireland. Butterly was not of the entertainment world but he could always spot an opportunity, and it wasn’t long before the disco was bringing in around a thousand pounds a week. 

However, there had been no planning permission granted to turn the building into a disco. ‘We just went ahead and did it,’ Butterly said later. And now he wasn’t able to get the planning permission because of fire safety issues with the building. 

Butterly did what he often did in situations like this: he turned to people he knew in Fianna Fáil to help him. ‘We were all Fianna Fáil-ers,’ he said. ‘What you had these people [politicians] for was to help get things. If you wanted to know something about your business or you wanted someone who could do something, you didn’t get answers by writing into the papers. You asked these people.’

So he asked. He turned to Kevin Boland, the Minister for Local Government. The two men knew each other well. Boland’s offices were close to the George’s Quay pub, so they would meet for a coffee and a chat ‘nearly every morning,’ Butterly said. It was bad news, however. Boland told him he could do nothing about it: he couldn’t go against decisions made by fire safety officers. If they had decided that the disco wasn’t safe then that was that.

Butterly knew two things: the disco couldn’t continue where it was and the business opportunity was too promising to stop for good. 

He had recently bought a huge factory in Artane to produce and package fruit, vegetables, jams and chocolates, but it wasn’t working out. It was producing more stock than could be sold, and it was losing money, which Butterly hated. He could see an answer: if he closed the factory and converted it into a disco, it would solve both problems. 

This is how the Stardust ended up in a converted warehouse in Dublin’s Artane, and how Butterly – at one stage the biggest grower of tomatoes in County Dublin – would end up, incongruously, also owning a huge nightclub complex. 

‘This was all Butterly country’ 

Patrick Butterly was born in 1919 in Rush, the coastal town that was – and still is – a major supplier of fresh vegetables to the rest of Dublin. Butterly loved Rush so much that he would holiday in the town, even while he was living there. ‘This was all Butterly country around here,’ he would later say. His family was poor but no poorer than the other people around them. He left school at 14 when he already had a few years of working under his belt: he would take the fruit and vegetables grown in his aunt and uncle’s one-acre garden, along with produce from his neighbours, and travel by pony into Dublin Corporation’s fruit and vegetable market in Smithfield in the city centre to sell it all.

He was, as he said himself, ‘always a divil for money’. In his teens, he had managed to save up enough to buy a second-hand car to get him into the Smithfield market faster than the pony, meaning he’d get there earlier and secure the best place to sell his vegetables. From the car, he traded up first to one lorry, and then two; he soon had a couple of men working for him. He bought a farm and then another one, and soon he was growing and packaging huge amounts of vegetables. 

He wasn’t precious about what he traded in: at one stage he was also selling turf and imported coal from Poland. ‘People say, “how did you make your money, Paddy?” Well, it wasn’t making money. I did a lot of business. I grew a lot of stuff and sold it in the right markets,’ he said. A lot of things he tried worked out but when they didn’t – farming cows and sheep didn’t prove successful, nor was a short-lived hotel on the Dublin–Belfast road – he would step away. He would never blame himself for any business failures, though. ‘Not everything I did worked out when other people were involved.’ Buying the factory in Artane had been a huge expansionary step and one he was proud of, but he was smart enough to know that it needed to pivot if it was going to make money. 

He and his wife Eileen had six children – Eamon, Colm, Donal, Padraig, Deirdre and Maeve – most of whom ended up being involved in the large web of family businesses. 

Eamon, who would later work at the Stardust, had initially intended to be a farmer. Patrick had sent him to agricultural school in Meath when he left school at the age of 14 in 1959, but it hadn’t worked out. Patrick wasn’t impressed with the teachers – priests – who he thought were too slow. He pulled Eamon out after six months and sent him to learn how to weld in Dublin instead. For years afterwards, Eamon would work in the family businesses, going where his father wanted him. When Butterly decided to convert the factory into an amenity centre in 1972, and build an industrial estate around it – Butterly Business Park – he could see a role for Eamon in it. 

The initial plan was to have a bowling alley, pub, restaurant and warehouse all under the one roof. This changed along the way though, as the planning permission wound its way through Dublin Corporation getting refused, rejigged and resubmitted as it went. In the end it took more than three years before full permission was granted on 29th October 1976. 

In June 1977, work on the conversion started. The venue was large and was expected to be able to cater for upwards of 1,500 people, and potentially up to 2,000. As well as the Stardust, there was a function room (The Lantern Rooms) and a pub (The Silver Swan) to be built. 

Eamon Butterly acted as the contractor, as well as the client, and hired eleven companies to work on it, ranging from plastering and electrical installation to plumbing and seating units. He had some limited experience of building warehouses and factories and he kept overall control of the work as it proceeded. There were no architects or engineers involved in supervising any of the work being done, apart from a company of engineers that was responsible for strengthening the roof. 

On 6th March 1978, the Stardust, the Lantern Rooms and the Silver Swan opened. 

While Patrick was behind the project, his son Eamon was the most hands-on member of the family when it came to the day-to-day running, eventually coming on board as the manager. 

In practice, Patrick Butterly made clear that his son Eamon had responsibility for the management and control of the premises. When asked if Eamon had any particular qualifications or experience that made him suitable to run the Stardust, Patrick said: ‘He did not need any special qualifications to run that business. . . all he needed was common sense and he had that.’ 

* * *

Financially, the Butterlys did well. Their focus was on the bottom line. In 1981, Eamon Butterly would tell a tribunal that he was brought in as the manager of the Stardust very soon after it opened. It was initially managed by someone else, but he noted that it ‘wasn’t going very well . . . financially’. (In perhaps a sign of things to come, when he was asked about this again in 2023, he would contradict his own evidence. ‘I don’t remember that,’ he told Bernard Condon SC at the inquests into the deaths of the people who died at the Stardust. ‘I don’t remember any problems with finances.’) 

Accounts for Butterly Business Park Limited, the holding company behind the Butterly group, showed that in 2010 the company – whose primary business was described as the ‘development and selling of real estate’ – had total assets of €10.9 million. Colm Keena noted in the Irish Times that this figure ‘may be a significant underestimate’. 

If this were another type of story, the Butterlys could be written about as an example of an Irish family who, during some of the most difficult decades economically for this country, grew a small market garden business into a multi-million-euro entrepreneurial operation, spanning a food processing business, a property company, a business park and a huge entertainment venue, among other things. But that is not how the name will be remembered. 

Years later, Eamon Butterly would be asked at the inquests into the deaths of all the people who died at the Stardust whether he had any regrets about what had happened. 

‘Is there anything you would do differently?’ Michael O’Higgins SC asked Butterly on 28th September 2023 as he wrapped up his questioning of the witness. 

‘I would never [have] got involved in converting that factory into a nightclub,’ Eamon Butterly responded. 

The Last Disco is out now – find it in any good bookshop or online here