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Irish Times

Grenfell Uncovered on Netflix: First-rate journalism highlights how working class victims were left waiting for answers

There are obvious parallels between the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London and the Stardust fire in Artane, Dublin , in that they were preventable calamities where the families of the dead were left waiting far too long for answers. There is also the fact that, in both cases, the victims were mainly working class. That element of the story is tackled head-on in Grenfell Uncovered, Olaide Sadiq's hard-hitting documentary about the 2017 London catastrophe, which claimed 72 lives. 'We were treated as if we didn't matter. We're working class, we're poor,' says one former resident of the west London tower block in comments that carry clear echoes of the official response to the Stardust blaze. Grenfell and its aftermath are told via eyewitness testimonies, including those of Luana Gomes, who was 12 at the time and had to be put into an induced coma after she and her family descended 21 flights of stairs in pitch-black smoke. 'We covered ourselves with the blankets my dad had put in the bathtub. I grabbed my dog. Dashed for the stairwell,' she says. The cause of the fire was the highly flammable cladding attached to the outside of the building in a penny-pinching makeover intended to address complaints that the tower had become an eyesore in affluent Kensington. One expert likens the covering to 'sticking a petrol tanker to the outside of the building'. Safer cladding would have cost extra – but not a lot, around £40 per renovated flat. [ Grenfell Tower, where 72 people died, 'to be demolished', families are told Opens in new window ] By the time of the fire, this cladding was already prohibited across much of Europe (although the situation in Ireland is not specified). But not in the UK, where Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron had led a campaign against state regulation of the private sector. 'The driving ideology was deregulation,' says one contributor. 'The state had no place telling private businesses what they should or shouldn't do.' READ MORE Cameron had been replaced by Theresa May by the time of Grenfell, and she was widely criticised for not visiting the tower block the morning after the fire. To her credit, she is the only prominent politician to appear in the Netflix film, and she accepts her share of culpability. 'One of the issues was the way in which authority had failed to listen to [the residents],' she says. 'I merely exacerbated that by not going to see them first off. It was important given the scale of the tragedy.' Were it possible, some politicians come off even worse than Cameron and May. There is Eric Pickles, now 'Lord Pickles' but, at the time, secretary of state at the Department for Communities and Local Government. At the official Grenfell inquiry, he urged officials not to waste his time – before confusing the death toll from Grenfell with that of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield. [ 'The fire broke our family': Grenfell was, above all else, a human tragedy Opens in new window ] 'Seventy-two residents died. 96 was the number of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster,' says housing journalist Peter Apps. 'That number should sit with everybody. If it's not important, you'll mix it up with another disaster where lots of working-class people died.' Grenfell Uncovered is important public service journalism, and it's a shame that the film couldn't resist a cheesy stunt at the end by appearing to imply that Luana's mother had died in the fire – only for it to be revealed at the end that she survives (though her unborn son did not). That one lapse aside, however, the film is first-rate long-form reporting. It makes you wonder, if Netflix were to apply the same journalistic rigour to Ireland, what might come wriggling out from under the rocks? Grenfell Uncovered runs on Netflix from Friday, June 20th