Inside Track Interview Information exchange
Mandy Rhodes Editor
As Kevin Dunion prepares to leave the Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner, he confirms that knowledge is most definitely power
It took just five minutes for the coal tip above Aberfan to slide down the mountain swamping Pantglas Junior School. Inside, the young pupils were beginning their first lessons of the day as the devastating landslide of mud, stone and debris flooded their classrooms killing 116 of them along with 28 adults. It was a tragedy that sent the nation into shock. Te date was 21 October 1966 and it is a memory still firmly etched in the minds of many parents today who, as children, watched in disbelief as the BBC broadcast the day’s terrible events.
Like children all over the country that dark
day, 10-year-old Kevin Dunion was sitting in his living room transfixed by the black and white television pictures that revealed the unfolding horror.
Te next day he went into school and appealed to his classmates at St Mungo’s in Alloa to hand over their money meant for play-pieces and lunch. Like pupils all over Britain, they gave their coins willingly and Dunion packaged the cash up and sent it to the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, for a disaster fund to help the families of Aberfan. But when Dunion later discovered that some of the monies raised by him and others like him had been used to clear the slag heap that had engulfed the primary school in the Welsh mining village rather than given directly to help the bereaved families, he was stung by a deep sense of injustice. “It’s a very early memory for me watching the broadcaster Cliff Michelmore crying on the news as he reported what was happening in Aberfan. Tat emotion is not something you expected to see on the BBC and it gave you an acute sense of the scale of the catastrophe.
12 December 2011
www.holyrood.com 13
Photography by David Anderson
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