A call for fresh inquests into the deaths of 50 people in the 1979 Betelgeuse tanker explosion on Cork’s Whiddy Island has been made by international maritime expert Michael Kingston.
Kingston, whose father Tim died in the explosion, has written to the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on behalf of the victims’ families.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday with Miriam programme, Kingston and his mother Mary claimed the deaths were unlawful due to “monumental regulatory failures” by the State in the lead-up to the disaster.
In the interview, Michael, and his mother, Mary, explain the circumstances of family life, with Tim Kingston, and the immense emotional consequences for their family, and the other victims’ families, of the disaster, and its aftermath. This was also echoed by former president Mary McAleese.
In the correspondence with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, copied to Minster Eamon Ryan and Paschal Donohoe, as successive Ministers for Transport, the families demand that the Taoiseach “direct Ireland’s Attorney General to order new inquests under Section 24 of the Coroner’s Act 1962”, Kingston said.
This was due to the “unreliability of the inquests on 12th July 1979 and 15th February 1980”, he said.
He said that having located the inquest file at the Co Cork Coroner’s Office, two witnesses, John Connolly and Bruce Tessyman, who provided statements to the inquest to establish the circumstances and timelines for the disaster in the lead up to the deaths, were subsequently proven to have fabricated the truth in the 1980 Whiddy Island Tribunal Report.
As the inquests are “unreliable”, the Attorney General is “obliged” to order new inquests, he said.
Kingston also states that the Government had ordered the Co Cork Coroner to destroy the file, which he refused to do. Mr Kingston also explains that further evidence of malpractice by some Gulf Oil employees on the island had emerged in 2022.
Kingston referred to two reports that the Department of Transport had “buried”, he said. One is by barrister Roisin Lacey of August 2010, and one by Captain Steve Clinch of July 2021 that conclusively shows that Ireland has been in deliberate breach of international regulation, and European regulation.
Repeating what he said on Sunday with Miriam, Mr Kingston said this was a “ doubling down on grief, by utterly disrespecting the lives that were lost in 1979 for similar Department of Transport failures, when we should never again make such errors”.
He asked the three ministers to “own up to the failure and publish the reports”.
The families have demanded a public enquiry into these on-going regulatory failures in the public interest and safety, following what they state has been “the most gross display of deliberate failure, causing death, that the Irish State has ever seen”, he said.
