Paul Wade (17), Artane – ‘He was the most outgoing and the one with the most friends’

The inquests into the deaths of the 48 young people who died in the Stardust fire in Artane, Dublin in 1981 feature pen portraits of each of the deceased read by bereaved family members. Find all of the portraits and more coverage here.

Paul was my younger brother by three years. There were five boys, and our mother and father. Paul was a twin to his brother Liam.

Paul was a very funny little lad ... Of all of us, he was the most outgoing and the one with the most friends. He was a people person. He was a great chatter and really good at chatting to girls.

We always went on holidays to Kilkee ... On the second day of the holidays, my mother would be in the kitchen and would turn around to see him with a fellah from Cork who he’d already made fast friends with. He was a hard lad to dislike. We had our fights but you couldn’t stay mad at him for long.

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I was with Paul that night – me and him and two girls from Derry. He had just started going out with a girl called Susie Morgan. They’d only been going out for a number of weeks, so he was excited. I was going out with one of her friends, Finola.

As far as I know, when the fire started, or at least when I became aware of it, there was a slow set on. Finola and I were dancing ... but Paul and Susie were way back up in the seats. I couldn’t find Paul and Susie. We lived a five-minute walk from the Stardust, so I went with Finola down to the house to see if they turned up.

I hopped on the motorbike. I’d two other brothers who had motorbikes. So the three of us were driving around Dublin checking the hospitals. Then we started figuring that he probably is dead.

Because he was 17, he had no tattoos and had perfect teeth – there were no dental records. He ended up being one of the seven unidentified.

Not being allowed to have a headstone for seven years upset my mother. You had to wait until they were classified deceased. Liam was contacted in 2007 to give a DNA sample, and then they had another funeral Mass ... We were all out at the graveyard when he was reinterred. It was a bit surreal because we were standing there ... in our 40s then, but he is forever 17.

My mother was [a] very religious woman ... used to go to Mass every day ... She just went completely downhill after Paul died. It hit her so hard she stopped going to Mass. She kind of lost her faith.

My dad ... tried and tried to get answers ... He went to all the meetings they would have had about it and attended the first tribunal. [He] wrote to TDs and European officials in Strasbourg. He tried to get answers and he went to his grave cursing what happened.

We didn’t have big emotional displays. You just had to get on with things. We tried not to let it take over our lives. My family and I loved Paul and we really miss him.