Clodagh Finn: Boeing crash victims' families still fighting for truth and justice
Naoise Connolly-Ryan at her home in Cork City. Her husband Mick Ryan from Lahinch, Co Clare died when the Boeing 737 Max his was flying in crashed minutes after taking off in Addis Ababa in Ethopia in 2019. Picture: Dan Linehan
If all else fails at the Oval Office on Wednesday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin might return to the phrase he levelled at Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald in the Dáil and tell the rest of the world that president Donald Trump is “ag insint bréaga arís” (telling lies again).
He is too gracious, too diplomatic, and much too statesman-like to do such a thing, although he must privately be wondering how, in the name of all that is plain to see, the leader of what was once the free world can call the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a dictator and say that his country — not invading Russia — started the war?
Given the petulant bully-boy shakedown of President Zelenskyy at the heart of US power last week, the Taoiseach must be feeling at least some trepidation before raising the contentious issues of war in Ukraine and Gaza, and trade.
But there’s another subject, equally contentious, that the Taoiseach has been asked to raise with the US president — the ongoing campaign by the families of the victims of two fatal Boeing crashes in 2018 and 2019 to get justice, accountability and transparency.
One of them, Cork-based Naoise Connolly-Ryan will again this year ask the Taoiseach to make representations to the president on behalf of the victims, among them her husband, humanitarian Mick Ryan, who died when a Boeing 737 Max crashed on March 10, 2019. All 157 people on board died.
The sixth anniversary of that deadly crash falls on Monday, a timely reminder that the relatives of those who died — and the 189 people killed in a preventable Lion Air Flight 610 crash in Indonesia on October 29, 2018 — are still fighting for justice.
In 2022, Judge Reed O’Connor ruled the people who died in both crashes should be considered “crime victims”. And he clearly put the blame on the US aircraft manufacturer when he said: “But for Boeing’s criminal conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration [the civil aviation regulator], 346 people would not have lost their lives in the crashes.”
He even went so far as to say that Boeing’s crime “may properly be considered the deadliest corporate crime in US history”.
The nature of that crime and how the company played Russian roulette with safety returned to the spotlight in January 2024 after missing door-plug bolts on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 caused a mid-air blow-out.
It added impetus to the relatives’ legal fight for justice. Over the years, that has involved a long and complicated back-and-forth on the ins and outs of aviation regulation, oversight and manufacturing standards.
As Naoise Connolly-Ryan says, the families want the aircraft-manufacturing giant to be held accountable for the deaths of 346 people, rather than just be fined in a series of “sweetheart deals” for fraud.
But we have entered the era of the political deal. As we have seen over the last bewildering weeks, the United States has torn up decades-old alliances and certainties.
Who then, in this climate, would have the temerity to take on Boeing, a company that America needs to be great again, to riff on the phrase of the moment? The aircraft and weapon-manufacturing company is an emblem of the country’s idea of itself; an expression of its economic, manufacturing and defence prowess.
The answer is the families of those who lost loved ones. They have the quiet persistence of long-term campaigners, the kind of people capable of staying the course in long, tortuous battles.
People like the Stardust families who campaigned for over four decades to get a verdict of unlawful killing in an inquest into the deaths of 48 people in a Dublin nightclub in 1981.
Flashback to 2009 when four members of the Stardust Victims’ Committee waited for over seven hours at a security hut near the Dáil while calling for a meeting with an official from the Department of the Taoiseach.
When they weren’t seen, they returned to continue their protest the following morning. That’s what real persistence looks like.
The relatives of the 29 people — including a woman pregnant with twin girls — killed in the 1998 Omagh bombing also know only too well what it is to fight for the truth. That was clear as they gave heartrending testimony at the recent Omagh inquiry. They say the inquiry is their “last, best shot” at the truth.
Let us hope that it delivers.
Another fight for recognition that comes to mind is the five-year campaign to have the US formally recognise as genocide the atrocities carried out by Myanmar’s military against the Rohingya people, a Muslim ethnic minority, in 2017-2018.
It might seem very far away but the plight of those displaced people resonates this week because Mick Ryan, the deputy chief engineer with the World Food Programme killed by Boeing’s “criminal conspiracy to defraud” the American aviation regulator, did so much to help them.
He was working in Bangladesh when close to a million Rohingya people fled persecution in Myanmar in 2018. As they settled in Cox’s Bazar, now the largest refugee camp in the world, their respite was temporary because the June-October monsoon season was coming. And with it, the risk of flooding and landslides.
As he had done so many times before in his job as a humanitarian worker, Mick Ryan turned to engineering for a solution. He pulled three UN agencies together — no mean feat, his colleagues said — and put in place a series of retaining walls, roads, culverts and bridges to prevent landslides.
When he was posthumously named the Irish Red Cross Humanitarian of the Year in 2020, one of his colleagues said: “Mick’s engineering prowess and ability saw a whole landscape transformed in miraculous time ensuring the provision of proper shelter for families.”
When the rains came, the camp had been secured and its inhabitants were safe, although he later spoke with deep regret that one little girl was killed in a localised landslide just outside the protected area.
A few short months later, Mick Ryan, aged 39, was dead himself, along with seven of his WFP colleagues when a Boeing 737 Max crashed six minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
By coincidence, this week, an envelope from Concern worldwide popped through the letterbox highlighting the appalling conditions now endured by those same refugees at Cox’s Bazar: “Children face deadly hunger from the moment they’re born,” it said.
Worse than that, they have been born into a world that is less willing to help to feed them. In this new Trumpian dystopia, the worldwide rush to buy arms has already led to cuts in overseas aid budgets. The focus now is on building protective barriers — note Ursula von der Leyen’s call to turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine” — rather than nurturing the people trapped between them.
The dial has shifted away from democracy and human rights to big business, power brokers and autocratic deal-making.
That won’t put off the people who campaign for justice though. And it won’t deter Naoise Connolly-Ryan. Although her collective fight for truth and accountability is long, lonely and relentless, she is in for the long haul.
