The horror of the Troubles is matched by craven timidity of the peace
Gail Walker, Belfast Telegraph, February 15th, 2025
Omagh: These poor people could have been any one of us, yet Stormont turns a deaf ear to harrowing Omagh probe
Maybe it's because the details are not being sanitised by a media mindful of public sensitivities during the Troubles or because, decades into a peace process, reminders of real-time suffering are unsettling, but the Omagh inquiry is the best counter terrorism campaign we never had.
Witness testimonies of physical and mental anguish, still working through their bodies and minds, just as the shrapnel embedded in so many still works its way to the skin's surface, make for harrowing listening.
Here is where all the glorification of terror runs into the dirt. 'Up the RA' chanting, quasi-military poncing around in estates, the takeover of town centres, the grey men in masks at funerals, is exposed for the tasteless pantomime it is.
A far more accurate picture of revolution or uprising or resistance or attack is built from the hundreds of tiny details revealed in a conference room in an arts centre on a bleak February afternoon, 26 years after a Real IRA bomb killed 29 people and two unborn babies and injured many others on August 15, 1998, in a busy town centre on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
Beside those telling their stories are a glass of water and a box of tissues. It is like an intense therapy session.
Nothing is restored. The dead are still dead. Bodies are not healed. The blind do not see. Justice will not be done because the inquiry's purpose is not to identify those responsible.
Phantom pain and the harm done to people
But it is a stunning evocation of the harm done to people. These are not 'just' victims or survivors but men, women and children seen and heard in all their human complexity — personalities, hobbies, ambitions, idiosyncrasies.
“My name is Pauline Harte and I was amputated and burnt as a result of the Omagh bomb on August 15, 1998,” begins a statement.
Then 19 and an art student, Pauline described how the engine of the car that exploded landed on top of her. “I was on fire underneath it. The tar was melted around me and my elbow was sunk into it.”
Police officers and members of the public burnt their hands freeing her. One told her “that he went home with my skin melted into his hands”. She spoke movingly on the trauma experienced by her rescuers.
Later, Pauline's mother sat outside the operating theatre. “She could hear the saw being used to amputate my leg but stayed because she knew I wanted her to be near me. I can't imagine what this did to her.”
Pauline suffers phantom pains in her amputated leg, has had operations to remove shrapnel, suffers chronic skin infections.
Garry McGillion, fiancée Donna-Marie and his sister Tracey were buying shoes for his 20-month-old niece, Breda, who was to be a flower girl at their wedding the following week.
His body was on fire, but he managed to find Donna-Marie underneath a large shop sign, her hand still on Breda's pram. He ran with Breda in his arms to get help. “To this day I can still feel Breda's heartbeat on my chest.”
Like so many, he has survivor's guilt — “why was I spared?” — and only recently has been able to open up about his feelings.
Donna-Marie had 65% third-degree burns to her face, upper body, arms, hands and leg. Given a 20% chance of survival, she received the Last Rites four times in hospital.
Many will recall the images of her wearing a plastic mask to aid her recovery and the McGillions' eventual wedding ceremony in 1999 made headlines, one of those positive symbols of triumph over adversity that grant the rest of us a kind of permission to leave atrocity behind.
But the McGillions never left the bombing behind.
Donna-Marie is haunted by the trauma from her time in ICU and the burns unit. “I was in extreme pain. It is very hard to explain, like getting burnt by an iron all over your body and multiplying it 200 times over.”
She has had numerous surgeries, had to get used to people staring at her facial scars and had two heart attacks related to the blast.
Stormont ‘on the dark side of the moon’
As far as Stormont is concerned, what's happening in Omagh might as well be happening on the dark side of the moon. The shocking headlines have zero impact there.
There wasn't even a moment's silence to mark the opening of the inquiry. Instead Omagh is kept at a far remove from the brass nameplates and oak tables of government.
Yet there are people at Stormont who would have perspectives on the purposes of explosives such as that.
It was planted by people who wanted to secure a political end. It wasn't a natural disaster. It was premeditated murder.
Omagh's evidence adds to our moral conundrums — if the IRA gang shot dead by the SAS at Clonoe had been transporting that bomb to Omagh, would that have been an unlawful killing?
The Assembly needs to be mindful at all times of the extremity of Omagh's testimonies. They are quite literally the stuff of nightmare.
Irrational, crazed, inhuman, malicious. If there is an enemy at the door of Northern Ireland, this is the opponent.
No whataboutery possible
We are getting to look at the face of what influenced our everyday lives here for decades. There is no whataboutery possible. There is no equalising atrocity anywhere. They all are the same thing. They all simply add to the pile of suffering.
At no point for the next 100 years will a person from this region not be accompanied every step of the way by the ghosts of all these atrocities.
There aren't boxes to tick — state here if you would wish to be reminded of the highlights of the Troubles or if you would wish never to be ambushed by other people's grief and to pretend everything is ok. Sadly, you will be ambushed.
Because the way to avoid that was by facing that opponent down, the ghastly killer that went through almost every community here, virtually every town, village and street corner, even into our living rooms, without fear or favour.
Part of the inquiry's remit is to establish whether security measures could have disrupted dissident activities in the run-up to the bombing — but that must never be allowed to absolve those who carried out the atrocity from responsibility.
We have had an Assembly here since 1998 and in the two-and-a-half decades since people have never known a single attempt to finish the hatred, put a lid on it, find somewhere to bury it, pour concrete on top of it and make sure nobody could get at it again.
There weren't even processes put in place to avoid shaming the grievously injured of Omagh.
Traffic warden Rosemary Ingram told the inquiry how she was “humiliated” and made to “feel like a victim all over again” after being forced to strip to her underwear for the NIO's compensation agency. “One of the lawyers even pulled with his pen at my underwear to see the extent of the scars.”
By 2002 was that really the best we could do?
Terror that was neighbourly, intimate and ordinary
These poor, poor people who lost loved ones and suffered appalling injuries could have literally been any one of us.
Our terror was memorable around the world because it was neighbourly, intimate and ordinary. You would go for a pint of milk and be blown to pieces. Open your door to a knock. Start your car to go to work. Turn up at a building site. Go to church. Go to a pub to watch football.
The stories of the impossible burdens people must carry that are being told in Omagh are an epic testament to loss and recovery and keeping going. Being able to say the words in public and to be listened to is a catharsis of sorts. Thousands of others deserve that opportunity too.
Yet so tin-eared is the Assembly, so ineffective the Executive, that the Omagh inquiry plays against the squabbling about higher salaries for Stormont.
Why isn't the inquiry on giant screens at Stormont, Belfast City Hall and in O'Connell Street in Dublin? Why are we pretending this has nothing to do with us? That this isn't an island-wide event of shame and humility?
That won't happen. Ever.
Because the horror of the Troubles is matched now by the craven timidity of the peace.
