The Omagh Bombing - August 1998
As history creaks on its bloody hinge, And the unspeakable is done again
“Mammy…Where's Mammy?” A little girl screamed it through the flames and smoke and the tumbling debris of slates, planks, bits of cars and arms and legs in Market Street, Omagh, moments after the bomb exploded. Mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sons, husbands, fathers and friends lay dead in the rubble. Twenty one people died at the scene. Others were horribly injured. Seven have since died and eight more are, as we go to press, still critically ill. Many people have lost limbs.
“It's a wee boy I always seem to ke
ep seeing, with his hair all burnt off,” said Irene Cooke, one of those who helped the injured at the scene.
“And I keep on hearing the screams of the people. You can't settle. You have to keep moving. You get to sleep but you wake up, remembering. You've an emptiness inside you for the people you know who've been killed.”
The clowns were putting the finishing touches to their makeup. The children were straightening out their costumes, about to climb onto the floats. The street carnival was ready to begin.
Omagh was busy. Some of the people were from the town. Others came in from Tyrone's countryside. Places like Beragh, Carrickmore, Sixmile-cross, Drumquin, Loughmacrory, Aughadarra, Eskra, Knockmoyle, Cappagh, Aughabrack, Killyclogher and Newtownsaville. Some came on a bus from Buncrana in the neighbouring county of Donegal, and they brought their Spanish visitors from Madrid with them.
But while these people made their ordinary journeys to and around Omagh, the bombers were also driving to town. The two men parked the maroon car outside Kells' drapery and school uniform supplier at the bottom of Market Street, activated the timer and walked away.
When Roisin Kelly heard there was a bomb scare, she knew to take it seriously. Her son had been close to a huge bomb, and the family's pharmacy on Market Street had been bombed three times. She headed towards Nicholl and Shiels furniture shop to wait. “I took two paces towards the door and then, for some reason, I put my two arms up around my head. When I turned around, two paces behind me were people who were dead.
“There was a lady beside me who was sobbing, ‘My leg, my leg.' I saw that it was partly blown off and I tried to hide it from her by putting a big teddy bear over it while I tried to comfort her. You didn't know whom to go to first. A water main had burst and the water was flooding down, washing a river of blood down the street.
“I touched a woman's ankles and they were cold as ice. I stroked her head, said an act of contrition. I rubbed my cheek against hers to let her know she wasn't alone. I saw my son walking with a woman and she had a young boy's foot in her hand. The lid of a manhole had been blown off, and when I went to lift it I found there was an amputated leg under it.” One witness said the scene was “like an abattoir after someone has gone crazy.” People spoke of the smell of blood and burning flesh. A fireball followed the explosion.
Tyrone is full of people with such memories now. “I saw a baby lying in a shop window like a rag doll,” said one man. Another said, “I saw a woman with her hip blown off. Another woman was lying and her leg had been blown off. There was two wee lassies sitting with a wee boy. He was about eight. I asked could I help them and one of them said, “He's dead. He's only a cub and he's dead.”
Wesley Reid is an Omagh RUC man based in the village of Fintona. He arrived at the scene minutes after the explosion. “It was horrendous. Women and children screaming and crying and blood pouring from them. I saw a lot of bodies. We got the walking wounded away to hospital in whatever vehicles were available and we put a cordon round the scene. I helped to lift the burning axle of a car off a young girl who was screaming and trying to get up. I saw a baby lying dead outside Kells' shop. I zipped up her body bag and then I broke down. An ambulance man looked at me crying and he said, “Its tight, big lad.” Tight, Constable Reid explained, is an Omagh word for terrible.
It fell to Constable Lynne Cordner to note details of the bodies in order to help identify them. “Bodies were arriving covered in blood and with terrible injuries,” she said. “I unzipped a white bag and it contained the body of a wee baby. It looked as if it was sleeping. I've never seen so many bodies before. I just switched off and did what I had to do. I've avoided the television and the papers. I don't want to see the faces of the people who were dead.” The last two people to be identified were Olive Hawkes and Brian McCrory. Only their fingerprints could identify both.
Tyrone County Hospital was, in the words of one doctor, “like a battlefield.” Staff had to paddle through blood to get to the injured, and when someone died, the immediate priority had to be to turn to help someone who might survive. Staff nurse Marian Skeath described the death of one woman. “There was a lady and she had her family with her but there was nothing more could be done for her and she was dead. She had to be taken off the trolley and put on the floor because someone else needed the trolley. It was an awful decision but it had to be made quickly. Her son said, ‘anywhere but the floor', so we made her a makeshift structure. I will never forget the look on her family's face. When someone dies they deserve the respect of a living person.” The nurses and doctors knew many of the dead and injured, and some lost close family members.
A consultant at the Altnagelvin hospital in Derry, Mr Kanwar Panesar, praised the way staff at Omagh had selected the patients they sent to the different hospitals. “We have orthopaedic expertise here, and we got mostly orthopaedic injuries. The Royal in Belfast got the serious burns,” he said. Mr Panesar said that patients were immediately given morphine and antibiotics, and the first of them were in theatre within 15 minutes of arrival. One young boy had lost a foot, and a foot had been sent with him, wrapped in plastic. But it was not his foot. It was a girl's foot, with painted toenails. Mr Panesar said the Altnagelvin's system for dealing with emergencies has been refined through experience.
Experience including Bloody Sunday, the Ballykelly bomb, and the Greysteel massacre. Many staff at the Tyrone and Erne hospitals have worked with victims of the Enniskillen bomb and of the Ballygawley ambush. The day before the bomb, the North's papers carried pictures of a young man who had been critically injured at Enniskillen, and now, 11 years later, was getting married.
At the Leisure Centre in Omagh, people gathered to wait for news of their loved ones. Lists were pinned up and amended as new information came in. Health board and council staff operated a system whereby those for whom the news was the worst were taken aside so that their grief could have some privacy. The area used for this was normally the crèche, a cheerful corner full of bright toys and paintings. One woman who helped run the incident centre said she regretted that no one had thought to exclude the media. “It's not that they weren't moved by what they saw. But they were clustering round families which had been bereaved, and wanting to use phones and faxes.”
The phone system in Omagh had in fact broken down. Rita Doherty is the mother of one of the Buncrana children who had gone to Omagh on the summer scheme trip along with the young Spanish visitors. “My daughter, Rita Marie, is eleven. She rang me and said, “Mummy, there's a bomb scare.” Then there was a huge bang and she was cut off.” There followed, for the families, hours of panic and terror as they waited for news from Omagh. “At 8.30 Rita Marie came up Knockalla Park. We were overjoyed, yet so sad that some of her pals have not come home.
She has been sleeping tight to me since. I'm so glad to feel the warmth of her skin against me. But I feel guilty that other parents will never know that feeling again.”
Oran Doherty (8) and Sean McLoughlin (12) were both from the little housing estate. “Wee smilers,” a neighbour called them. James Barker (12), whose parents had moved to Buncrana from England to give their family a better life, lived across the small Donegal town, which looks out over Lough Swilly, the lake of shadows. On Monday night the bodies were brought home. “There was a hush over the whole area and then when the hearses appeared, everyone was crying out loud,” said Rita Doherty. “People were trying to gather the children into a wee nest in our arms, they were so devastated. We all feel we are caught up in something we don't understand and there never will be any explanation because it doesn't make sense. It makes me frightened to be part of the planet. Poor Ireland. It is dear buying it. To lose our beautiful wee babies out of this town.”
James Barker's 14 year old sister, Estella, wrote in my notebook, “He was kind and gentle and always thought about other people. We loved him very much. We will never forget what those men did to all those innocent people.” Mary Gallagher, with whom 12 year old Fernando Blasco was staying, said that his death had left her feeling as if she had lost a son. “He was a lovely child,” she said. “I called him Speedy Gonzalez. He was so full of life.”
There were two days of funerals. So many funerals. At one stage, in Omagh town, three hearses were on one street at the same time, and mourners standing outside one packed church could hear the singing from another across the way. People were unable to attend the funerals of close friends because closer friends or relatives were also being buried.
Breda Devine was just 21 months old; a miracle child who had been born several months premature and was saved only by dedicated nursing at the Altnagelvin hospital in Derry, and the love of her parents. Her mother, Tracey, had brought her to Omagh to buy her shoes to wear to the wedding of her uncle. She was to be a flower girl. She lies now in her grave in the foothills of the Sperrins. Paul Devine carried the small white coffin of his daughter under one arm. Breda's brother who is six, touched the coffin, his little face desolate. Tracey Devine lay critically ill in a Belfast hospital, not knowing she had lost her youngest child.
Little Maura Monaghan should be excited about the imminent birth of the twin girls her mother Avril was expecting in September. Instead Maura, aged 18 months, now lies beside Avril (30), in the graveyard at Beragh. The twins are dead and buried too, though they were not yet born. So is their Grandmother, Avril's mother, Mary Grimes. It was her 65th birthday that Saturday and Avril had brought her into town to celebrate. Mary's husband, Michael, had a bunch of flowers in the house to give her when she got home. She was carried home to wreaths instead.
“She was my wife. She was my mother. She was my daughter. She was my friend. She was my soul mate,” sobbed Lawrence Rushe. Libby Rushe (57) spent the hours before her death in her café, Libby's, serving coffee and buns to tired shoppers. Debra Anne Cartwright (20) the daughter of a policeman who helped in the aftermath of the explosion, had been helping women look good for the weekend, in her summer job at the beautician's above Kelly's pharmacy. She was to go to study textile design in Manchester this autumn. Julie Hughes (21) was home from university at Dundee to see her parents. She had a summer job in a photo shop on High Street. Her twin brother, Justin, followed her coffin along with her other siblings.
Many of the dead were young. Some of them should have got their “A” level results the Thursday after the bomb. Lorraine Wilson (15) and her friend Samantha McFarland (17) were working as volunteers in the Oxfam shop, where a sign in the window reads; “The people of Sudan need your help.”
Several of the young people were talented at sports. Jolene Marlowe (17), who had helped St Macartan's win the Tyrone Senior Football championship a week before her murder, had brought her elderly great-aunt, Bernie Shaw out for a day at the shops. Brenda Logue (17) was a goalkeeper, who was in town with her mother and grandmother. Gareth Conroy (18) was in Omagh to buy contact lenses, the better to play football. His number seven jersey will not be worn again this year, a Loughmacrory GAA spokesman said. At his funeral, a small child sat on a gravestone and asked, “Daddy, why is Gareth is that box?”
Alan Radford (16), a Mormon, was helping his mother with the shopping. His father, Melvin, a former British soldier, had been seriously injured by the IRA and had gone to England after threats some years ago. Alan's brother, Paul, went searching for his brother after the bomb, and ended up digging others out of the rubble. Aidan Gallagher (21) had gone into Watterson's to buy boots and jeans. The IRA murdered his uncle, a part-time UDR man, 14 years ago. Aidan's father spoke in a heartbroken whisper about his only son. “He was an ordinary fellow. He was just everything you would want him to be.”
Philomena Skelton (39) only lived a few miles from Omagh, at Drumquin, but she was, her husband Kevin said, “a home bird”, and went to the town just twice a year, once to do her Christmas shopping, and once to get school uniforms for her children. Her 13-year-old daughter, Shauna, who was injured in the blast, was allowed out of hospital briefly to follow her mother's coffin. She carried a single orchid.
Veda Short (46) from Gortaclare in South Armagh, Ann McCombe (48) and Geraldine Breslin (35) were described by Roisin Kelly as “three great girls.” Ann, a Protestant, was best friends with Geraldine, a Catholic. They worked for Tom Watterson, an evangelical Protestant. His clothes shop was closed with a notice on its shutters stating that it would remain so until after the funerals “of our three highly respected and dedicated members of staff.” Mrs Short had held a newborn baby in her arms—her grandson, Lee—just hours before she was murdered.
Esther Gibson (36) was on her way back from having pictures of herself and her fiancé, Kenneth, fitted into a locket he had given her, when the bomb went off. A Sunday School teacher, she had written in her bible a few years ago, “Oh God if it please thee, send me a man of God to be his partner in life.” She met Kenneth two years ago. “I wish I had died with her,” he said, weeping, when he heard she was gone. Rocio Abad (24) was one of the leaders who had brought the Spanish children to Buncrana from Madrid, and she was supervising them on the day out to the Omagh Folk Park, and afterwards to the shops. She loved Ireland.
Olive Hawkes(60) was a farmer's wife, described by a relation as, “a person who would drop everything and run to help anyone who needed it.” Brian McCrory (54) was described by friends as a good and gentle man, a crane driver. One of his wreaths read, “To my lovely dancing partner.”
Edith White lost her husband and her son in the massacre. Fred White (60) and his son, Brian (27) were out for the afternoon together. Mr White senior was a leading member of the Ulster Unionist Party in Omagh. Brian White worked for the Boys Brigade in his spare time. Both were horticulturists and Brian was responsible for the design and maintenance of flowerbeds and hanging baskets in towns and villages across Tyrone.
Omagh is what is known as a mixed town, and the dead faithfully reflected the religious breakdown of the area. Whereas some towns in the North might better be described as segregated such is the hostility between the two communities, Omagh is a mild and mannerly place, though some of its hinterland villages are fiercer. In Kells' shop, nine people died. The women buying school uniforms there were from both communities, though in Fermanagh catholics boycotted branches of the outfitters after Drumcree 1996, because of Mr Kells' involvement in the Orange Order.
Omagh was gerrymandered after partition to ensure Unionist control, and Catholics lived for years in the overcrowded Gallows Hill area. “It is a garrison town. We are used to a military presence,” said Christine Nesbitt, community relations officer with the council. The town was shocked earlier this year by the murder of a young woman.
There is one integrated school. The carnival, which was to take place on the day of the bomb, was a cross-community one, and the Churches Forum provided a structure for the communal mourning, which has taken place since. Nicola Emery (21) was hurt in the bomb, but gave birth to a healthy baby girl days later. Nicola is Protestant, while her partner, Michael Mulholland (17), is Catholic. There is a graveyard in the town where both Catholics and Protestants are buried.
The anti-Agreement UUP dissident, Willie Thompson, is the MP for the area. During the last Westminster election count in Omagh Leisure Centre, when Martin McGuinness took his mid-Ulster seat, Reverend Willie McCrea told voters they would “reap a bitter harvest.” Ken Maginnis, the UUP's security spokesman, said that at one of the funerals, a young man had said to him that those who had advocated a Yes vote in the May referendum had a lot to answer for. “I said to him, there are 3,300 dead as a result of 30 years of the Troubles. We have to work together.”
In Buncrana, Martin McGuinness said Sinn Féin had felt no animosity from the people after the bomb. “They recognise that the people who planted it want to destroy what Sinn Féin has worked for in this process.” A young man from an IRA family said, “No one better talk to me now about armed struggle.” He said, however, that there would be no “informing” on old accomplices. Others, however, said that blind eyes might no longer be turned to guns hidden in Donegal hay sheds.
The former Sinn Féin councillor, Francie Mackey, now chairman of the group which fronts the Real IRA, is a member of Omagh District Council. His son was one of those arrested after the bomb, and, at an emergency council meeting two days later, he said he would be seeking council support to have the boy freed. “He was ignored,” said one of those present. All those arrested have since been released.
DUP councillor, Oliver Gibson, is a close relation of Esther Gibson who died in the massacre. “There have been 28 bombs in Omagh, and my constituency of West Tyrone had seen more murders than any other in Northern Ireland,” he said. His brother died a week before the bomb from the long-term effects of an IRA ambush. Reverend Ian Paisley called at Esther Gibson's Free Presbyterian funeral for God the avenger “to execute wrath upon him who does evil.” There were cries of Amen. Other church leaders, Protestant and Catholic, called for support for the Peace Process. Many of the people in and around Omagh, including the young people, are deeply religious, their God, for the most part, being a benign one. Some balked, though, at calls from the Catholic Church, for prayers of forgiveness for the bombers.
PUP loyalist leader David Ervine warned, within days of the bomb, that the UVF cease-fire might now be under threat. “How could anyone human believe for one moment that the right response to this atrocity is more bloodshed?” said one woman. “We were only coming to terms with the murder of the Quinn children.” Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn, aged 10, 9 and 8, died when loyalists firebombed their home in Ballymoney after a demonstration in support of the Orange Order at Drumcree in July. Their Mother, Christine, is a Catholic.
Asked about the Real IRA's “apologies to the civilians” statement, one man shook his head silently, and gestured towards people weeping as they placed flowers on Drumragh Bridge, the ruined buildings beyond them. There was a ripple of applause for the RUC's search team as they crossed the bridge after a day on the bombsite. Prince Charles came, and spoke about the murder of Earl Mountbatten. “You'd miss Diana,” said a woman. Princess Diana had visited the survivors of the Enniskillen bomb. Among the crowds that gathered to mourn Omagh's dead and to honour their survivors, there was a sense of solidarity, compassion and peace.
The bomb has re-opened old griefs all over the North. Talking to people in the crowds outside packed churches and chapels during the funerals, it is striking how many people refer to murders in their own families over the past 30 years. Paddy O'Hagan's pregnant wife Kathleen was murdered by the UVF at their home in Co Tyrone four years ago. “It has brought everything back as if it was yesterday,” he said.
Omagh council's chief executive, John McKinney, has vowed that the town will be rebuilt, and that the people will find the strength to recover. Poet John Montague who comes from Tyrone, remarked upon the fact that the bombers struck on the day which in the Catholic calendar is the Feast of the Assumption, when the Blessed Virgin ascended to heaven. He spoke for many when he said; “One hopes this is the end for extreme Republicanism, just as one hopes that the death of the three Quinn children marks the end for extreme Orangeism.”
Ministers and priests have called on God to give the people the Balm of Gilead, to comfort and support them so that the weak might “soar on wings like eagles.” Surgeons have administered morphine, and pharmacists Valium. The agony, for now, seems undiminished.