Tuskar Rock victims to be remembered at Cork ceremony this weekend

The lives lost in the Tuskar Rock air disaster will be remembered on Sunday with a special ceremony in Cork.

Aer Lingus flight 712 crashed into the sea near Tuskar Rock off Wexford on March 24, 1968.

The Aer Lingus Viscount was on a flight between Cork and London Heathrow when it crashed. All 57 passengers and four crew members died. They included 33 Irish, nine Swiss, six Belgian, five British, two Swedes and two US citizens.

Fourteen bodies were found afterwards, including one who has not been identified to date and is buried in a Wexford cemetery.

The names of the victims will be recalled at the memorial event in St Anne’s Church in Shandon, Cork city, organised by Jerome McCormick, whose brother Neill was among the victims.

The event on Sunday will be the sixth such one.

It takes place at 12.30pm.

Mr McCormick said that more than 100 people attended last year’s ceremony.

He said: “We will call out the names of those who died and give candles to family members. We will have a violinist playing the Ave Maria.” 

Mr McCormick said that the families of 47 of the victims have no grave to visit because their loved ones’s remains were never found.

A report published in 2002 found that the crash may have been a result of structural failure of the aircraft, corrosion, metal fatigue, ‘flutter’ or a bird strike.

The possibility of the involvement of any other aircraft or missile was ruled out.

However, the cause of the crash remains a mystery.

The Cork-London Heathrow route had retained the EI 712 flight number, but it was changed last year to EI 714 following contact from a relative who was taken aback when he saw the flight number was still being used several years later.