An Cosantóir

An Cosantóir September 2015 www.dfmagazine.ie 24 | A man chants a hindu prayer and the smell of incense wafts gently on the breeze. In the early morning sunshine the mountain tops are shrouded in mist. The water laps gently at the shore and in the great still- ness seabirds call. I could be at an outdoor yoga retreat in the himalayan foothills but I am actually in West Cork, in Ahakista, attending the 30th anniversary memorial service for victims of the Air India disaster of 23rd June 1985. On that day a jumbo jet carrying 329 souls from Canada to India via London was blown to smithereens off the south-west coast of Ireland by a terrorist bomb. At the time I was a 19-year-old medic on LÉ Aisling. All 329 pas- sengers were lost that day and we pulled 39 corpses from the ocean. Like my crew mates and companions, I was completely unprepared and overwhelmed by what I saw around me; men, women, children and infants mutilated beyond recognition, broken beyond imagination. A small, inflatable Gemini was put in to the water to retrieve bodies and when its crew had wrestled as many corpses from the ocean as the boat could hold they re- turned to the ship, their cargo covered in a bloody, white sheet. From the Aisling's afterdeck we watched them work and as the piles grew higher we dreaded their return. Each time the Gemini was hoisted on board, a process of disentanglement would begin. A man at each end; a nod between them; lift the sheet; and away we go... "I have the head, do you have the legs?" "I can't find them…" The day wore on and the dead piled up around me. Bat- tered into submission and disbelief I grew numb. Over and over it went; 14 trips by the Gemini crew. For 14 hours we worked wrapping the bodies in sheets: there were no body bags. We made temporary mortuaries from the engineers' office and the carpenter's store. Hardened sailors spoke tender words to little babies as they laid them alongside women they hoped in vain might be their mothers. The memorial garden at Ahakista, which is under the care of Cork County Council, is a place of sublime beauty and stillness: it holds the soul and the pain too. That pain and loss is etched deeply on the faces of the relatives and families of the victims who travel here every year on their lonely pilgrimage. They speak of it as a place of great heal- ing, where a glimmer of light can be found in the bottom- less pit of grief and agony caused by waking one Sunday morning to learn your entire family have been blown out of the sky at 33,000 feet; or that your children rained from the sky, falling like petals upon the great ocean below. Many of those who come to the memorial are aged and stooped now, though the next genera- tion is spring- ing up to take their place. One woman, who was one year old when she lost her by JIM SPERIN, A/SEA MEDIC RETD b&W PhOTOS COURTESy OF MILITARy ARCHIVES

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