IN DEPTH: AIR INDIA
Notebook
Peter McCluskey, CBC News Online
Peter McCluskey covered the Air India disaster for CBC TV. He was the first Canadian reporter on the scene and spent many days in Dublin and Cork where he met and spoke with dozens of the victims' relatives.
I don't think I'll ever forget the tears, the weeping, the grief, the loss, the pain. It was so personal, so private, yet so public.
I had left Belfast for Cork just a few minutes after hearing the Air India plane had disappeared off the radar screens of the air traffic controllers in Shannon. On the way to Dublin, in a taxi, I had to plead with the driver to switch away from the football or hurling match he was listening to and put on the news. Slowly it started to sink in: there were more than 300 people on that flight. No one would survive.
After filing my stories for the CBC I was free to do what just about everyone does in Ireland, stroll the streets and talk. Cork had become the centre of the operation. That was where the bodies of the victims would be taken.
On the Tuesday, two days after the disaster, I watched an Indian man at the Cork airport. He was dishevelled, tired and worn out. When he picked up a copy of the local newspaper his body started to shake and he began wailing and sobbing uncontrollably. He had just seen the front page picture of dozens of shroud covered bodies laid out in a building at the naval base. His weeping brought stares from the journalists - but sympathy from his fellow travellers.
It seemed that hour by hour more relatives and friends were arriving - some by air, some by train - from Canada, from England, from India. They needed to be there to see for themselves what was not comprehensible - that their wives, husbands, children, grandchildren had been murdered and it was unlikely their bodies would ever be returned to their grieving families.
It hadn't been that long since I had lost someone dear to me. But at least I had kissed goodbye and attended the burial rites.
The Irish are no strangers to tragedy. Irish history is littered with monumental events that symbolically live in the collective soul. But Ireland is also a nation of seagoing people. And as anyone in Newfoundland, or B.C., or the Arctic can tell you, sometimes those who take to sea don't come back. There isn't a city, or town, or village on the coast of Ireland that hasn't grieved for sons and fathers that didn't return. I suspect that's why the people of Cork never turned their backs on those families of the Air India victims that began trickling into their community.
They came by ones and twos. They didn't know where to go to get information. They came to the airport and quizzed reporters. They waited for the morning newspapers in the town centre. They stood in front of the TV sets in the airport. On the day the rescue operation turned into a recovery operation they cried and cried.
One older woman stood on the quays in Cork one night and tried to throw a bunch of flowers into River Lee. Probably so weakened and numbed by grief, she couldn't muster the strength to get them into the water. A man passing by picked them up and tossed them into the river for her. "I'm sorry for your loss, missus," he said to her.
Three hundred and twenty-nine people died on the beautiful June morning, most of them were Canadians.
There were 329 deaths, but I can tell you there were thousands of victims.
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