To: Dublin City Council, South Dublin County Council, Office of Public Works, Minister for Justice

Time for a truthful account of the death of Celia de Jesus!

Issue a truthful account of the death of Celia de Jesus for social peace and climate justice!

Why is this important?

On 24th October 2011, Irish citizen and hospice worker Celia de Jesus lost her life during a major flood event in Dublin. Unable to exit her basement flat as floodwater quickly rose at her door, she was trapped and drowned. In his report, the Dublin District Coroner of the time argue that Celia de Jesus drowned “as a result of a surge of water and flooding over a short period of time following two days of heavy rain”, reaching a final verdict of “death by misadventure”. However, extensive research into the tragic event reveals that the coroner report omits several pieces of evidence clearly challenging the conclusion of the report. Two of the main pieces of evidence left out of the report are as follows:

  • EVIDENCE 1: Celia de Jesus’s landlord had not received planning permission to divide the basement of his property into two rental units. Celia de Jesus was therefore renting an unauthorised basement flat. Furthermore, while located in a well-known flood-prone area, the basement flat had only one means of exit, the entrance door. All windows of the flat were blocked with metal bars. When Celia de Jesus was unable to open her entrance door for unknown reasons, she had no other means of exit at her disposal and was trapped. These pieces of evidence are never explicitly mentioned in the report and never outlined as a major cause of the tragic death. Instead, the claim is made that the works to divide the basement into two rental units (“appear to”) precede the Building Control Act 1990 and that, as a result, they shall be deemed to have been permitted. However, such a legal technicality cannot justify entertaining a misleading account of the tragic death.

  • EVIDENCE 2: In the coroner report, a list of planning applications submitted for the property in which Celia de Jesus died, both granted and refused, is provided. However, one planning application, dated 2009 and refused, is not included in the list. In this planning application addressed to Dublin City Council, it is stated that the property in which Celia de Jesus lived and died is “not of a habitable standard” (architect report, planning application 3066/09). Despite such a concerning statement, the issue failed to be addressed, which constituted another significant enabler of the tragic event.

Following the tragic event and until now, various state and local government agencies, among them Dublin City Council, South Dublin County Council and the Office of Public Works, have actively sustained the misleading account of Celia de Jesus’s death in reports and during public meetings. Instead of mentioning the planning breach and institutional failure that led to the tragic death, they consistently and unliterally blamed the flood. The misleading account was widely relayed in the local and national press and among local communities.

As we are now approaching the fifteenth anniversary of the tragic death, we ask Dublin City Council, South Dublin County Council, the Office of Public Works and the Minister for Justice to take the following actions as a matter of urgency:

  • ACTION 1: Issue a public statement explaining the full circumstances of the death of Celia de Jesus based on all available evidence
  • ACTION 2: Issue a public apology for having sustained a misleading account of the tragic death
  • ACTION 3: Request an immediate review of the coroner report and of its final verdict

Please sign the petition to support these demands and share as widely as you can thank you!