The Air India Memorial Garden was officially opened on 23 June 1986, exactly one year after the bombing. Cork County Council purchased the site after relatives of the victims, having flown from India and Canada in the days following the disaster, came to the nearest point of land to where their loved ones had died and asked that something be built. The opening ceremony was attended by the foreign ministers of Ireland, India, and Canada - an acknowledgment that the dead belonged to all three nations and that Ahakista, though small, had become a place of international grief. The garden's focal point is a sundial designed by the Cork sculptor Ken Thompson. Its alignment is precise: the sun strikes the dial face at 08:00, the moment the bomb detonated at 31,000 feet, near the end of the flight's transatlantic leg from Montreal to London Heathrow. The plane fell into the Atlantic about 190 kilometres southwest of this coast.

Air India Flight 182 was operating Montreal to London to Delhi to Bombay when it disappeared from radar at 07:14 GMT. The bomb had been placed in checked luggage by members of a Sikh extremist group seeking revenge for the Indian Army's 1984 storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar. There were no survivors. Of the 329 dead, 268 were Canadian citizens, most of them Indian-Canadians, and 86 were children. Eight days later, a related bombing at Tokyo's Narita Airport killed two baggage handlers - a parallel device intended for another Air India flight, detonated prematurely. The Air India 182 bombing remained the deadliest aviation terrorism incident in history until 11 September 2001. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation became the largest and longest in Canadian history. The legal proceedings dragged on for decades; only one man was ever convicted in connection with the attack, after a trial that took until 2003. Most of the dead were never identified by their bodies. Many were never recovered at all.

The wreckage and remains fell into the sea on a stretch of Atlantic that ships from Cork could reach faster than anywhere else. Bodies recovered in the days after the bombing were brought ashore and taken to Cork Regional Hospital. When the families arrived from across the world, traumatised and looking for somewhere to be, they were brought to Ahakista because it was the nearest accessible coast. They stood at the harbour and threw wreaths into the water. The decision to build a memorial here was theirs, not the Irish government's. Ireland was, in this case, the country that received the grief and held it - and continues to hold it, year after year, with a small ceremony on a midsummer morning. The annual commemoration draws families, diplomats, and locals together at the sundial. The Indian and Canadian governments have sent representatives; an Irish President has attended. For most of the year the garden is quiet, with the sea wind moving through it. Each 23 June it is briefly full again, holding what cannot be filled.

Ahakista's life has continued around the memorial without being defined by it. The village's deep, sheltered harbour hosts the Ahakista Regatta each August bank holiday weekend, fishing boats and pleasure craft side by side. There are two pubs with beer gardens - one of them locally called the Tin Pub for its corrugated-iron walls and roof. There is a small sandy beach, a wine shop, and several places to stay. The Sheep's Head Way, a 90-kilometre marked trail, threads through the village; in August 2008 it became one of Ireland's first four publicly funded walkways. Older histories layer the landscape: ringforts and fulacht fiadh sites in the surrounding townlands, and a Bronze Age stone circle at Gorteanish, undocumented until the 1990s and only excavated and renovated in 2023. The writer Wolf Mankowitz lived in Ahakista until his death in 1998. The children's author Noel Streatfeild spent summers here; the area features in her book The Growing Summer. Graham Norton, the television host, owns a holiday home overlooking the harbour and Dunmanus Bay. Ahakista holds all of this - festival weekend and famine sundial - on the same small shore.