TM/096

Maybe those 29 people did not die in vain after all
BRIAN READE VISITS OMAGH A YEAR AFTER THE ATROCITY

IT'S a scene which drags your senses back to those long childhood summers.
Chlorine fills the nostrils, wet-haired kids on plastic seats ram crisps into their mouths and slap each other with bags, while shrieks of laughter echo off the brick walls.
At Omagh Leisure Centre, normality has been resumed.
How different it looks from this weekend last year, when a temple to youth and life was brutally transformed into a waiting-room for death.
When it became the focal point for a town paralysed by grief after a 500lb car bomb killed 29 people, including seven young children, and injured 300. When 26 sheets of foolscap paper were pinned on the leisure centre walls, listing the names of the injured.
When big men shook like babies as they showed pictures of wives and children to the RUC, who attempted to match them up with the charred remains that lay under sheets in the makeshift mortuary.
When priests held broken souls close to their chests and let them weep. Because they had no words to explain this barbaric futility.
Those of us who intruded on Omagh's grief a year ago will take such memories to our grave.
Likewise the scenes at the funerals. Funerals like the one in nearby Ballinagurrah, where Mickey Monagahan held the hands of his three small children and grimaced at a hole in the ground where they lowered his 18-month-old daughter Maura, his wife Avril and the remains of her twins, who were a month away from life.
Terrible, haunting sights which struck at the pit of your stomach.
But when you glanced beyond them, at the bigger picture of Omagh last August, what struck you most was the immense dignity of this town.
A neat, middle-class community the Troubles had all but by-passed. Where the only outrage they had known was a small blast outside the courthouse in 1995 which left a security guard needing treatment for shock. A town whose 10,000 citizens, virtually 50 per cent catholic 50 percent Protestant, lived in relative harmony.
And when their turn for an atrocity came, it came in the form of the most devastating bomb in Ireland's bloody 800-year war. And Omagh took it with a quiet nobility.
As the anniversary dawns, it still retains that rare decorum. Which makes this outsider realise all over again why Omagh is such a special place.
Why every person who lives on these islands should remember the horror of the blast in Market Street, when children were blown to bits as they were fitted out for their new school uniforms, and demand the politicians deliver peace.
The innocents who were slaughtered are owed something better than rhetoric. Their precious memory demands much more than empty tribal posturing.
"Being involved with the families of the bereaved this past year has been a painful privilege." says Michael Gallagher, who lost his 21-year-old son Adrian.
"Painful when you learn first-hand from the families how beautiful and wonderful the ones who died were. And privileged because of the courage the people left behind have shown.
"They have done extremely well, particularly when you consider that no one has yet been punished for their deaths, even though the names of the perpetrators must surely be known.
"There are people with anger, of course, but considering the numbers involved it is remarkably few. Omagh has handled this in a truly amazing manner.
"But that reflects the nature of the people who died, They weren't loud aggressive people. They were decent, ordinary, nice people just going about their business on a sunny Saturday afternoon, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."
In the aftermath of the bomb "the wrong place" was sealed off. You viewed it from a bridge 100 yards away. Helicopters pounded overhead, police picked away with plastic bags at the waterlogged rubble, alarms raged, traffic lights flashed. It was shell-shocked anarchy. Today, Market Street is open. Down where the bomb went off, either side of the road is a boarded-up building site. The nearest derelict shop doorway has become a small shrine. Twenty unlit candles sit on the steps with a dozen wreaths propped up against them, bearing simple messages such as: "To the ones who died."
Omagh doesn't want a big memorial site. It doesn't want a monument to tell the world how the bombers tried to snap its heart in two.
THERE are tens of dozens of human reminders of that failed attempt, walking the streets, lacking limbs and bearing scars.
One is Glenn Porter, the manager of Photo Express. That Saturday, he and his staff were suddenly evacuated. Police had received a warning of a bomb near to the courthouse at the top of the hill in Main Street.
They were ushered down the High Street to the junction of Market Street and Dublin Road. And at 3.10pm they strayed into the path of the exploding car.
One of Glenn's part-time assistants, Julia Hughes, 21, was killed. Glenn was hit by shrapnel and still bears the scars on his face and forehead. But, remarkably, he bears little bitterness.
"Like everyone else in Omagh, I am just trying to get on with my life," he says. "My son was two weeks old when the bomb went off, and right now, instead of thinking about the first anniversary of the bomb, I am trying to think of his first birthday. Because when it comes down to it, all we have got is the future.
"I was so lucky to escape, and now every hassle seems of minimal importance. Particularly when I think of poor Julia."
What astonishes Glenn and most of the other people you speak to in Omagh is that the murderers picked their town to satisfy their blood-lust.
"Omagh is a satellite around sectarianism," he says. "People here just don't have a bigoted mind-set. That is what makes it so outrageous, because none of us think like that."
His message to the politicians is simple: "Just sort it out, will you? You can't risk losing one more life."
And his message to the men of terror: "No matter what happened that day, and no matter what happens with the peace process, Omagh will carry on just as it was. The people here have shown you will never break their spirit."
Omagh has been very tense. It sees the anniversary looming and it feels the weight of emotion coming down on its shoulders once more. In the town centre streets, people talk quietly. There is little laughter, as though to laugh would be to insult the memory of the dead.
A few hundred yards down from Market Street, people still struggling to come to terms with the bombing drop into the Bridge Centre to seek advice and comfort from a trauma recovery team.
In the waiting room tranquil music plays, quasi-religious messages hang on the walls and lost, red-eyed people try to find solace in this peaceful oasis.
Many find it too painful to go to the centre. Some still find it too painful to go into town.
Shauna Skelton says: "I don't think anybody goes into Omagh-to spend the day now. They get in and out as quickly as possible, for fear there might be another bomb."
The 14-year-old was out shopping with her sister Tracey, 16, and her mother Mena when the bomb went off. She and her sister are lucky to be alive. Mena wasn't so lucky. This is how her husband Kevin describes discovering her body:
"I found her lying face down in the rubble with her clothes blown off. I reached for her arm. There was no pulse and I knew she was dead. There was no sign of Shauna or Tracey.
"I then found Tracey. She was on her knees beside her mummy, feeling her pulse."
Those pathetic images still burn in the minds of the people of Omagh. Images like that of the baby lying dead in the shop window of The Salad Bowl, while a little boy's leg with its shoe still on lay in the glass outside.
Michael Gallagher is sitting in his front room, staring at a graduation photo of his son Adrian, who was out buying a pair of overalls when the bomb killed him.
"We did so much together," he says. "See that fireplace? We made that out of an old organ. We put down this wooden floor together, and the one in the room next door.
"Adrian was a lad you could depend on. I have two daughters, but it is such a total loss when you lose your only son."
Michael, a Catholic, has more reason than most to hate the republican killers. His brother was murdered by the IRA in 1984.
"Maybe I learned some ways of coping from that, but it doesn't make it any easier," he says.
"The Omagh bomb wasn't meant to destroy buildings, but to kill people. People who were involved In nothing other than getting on with their own lives. And for them to die and it not to make a difference is an insult to their memory."
Like many of the 72 per cent of Northern Irish people who backed the Good Friday peace agreement, Michael holds politicians of all sides in contempt for allowing a vacuum to threaten peace. "At ground level, the politicians are simply out of step with the people," he says.
"We had so much hope after the bomb. We felt the whole country was saying: 'We've seen enough pain and we don't want to be associated with people getting brutalised, no matter what the cause, ever again.'
"We all feel let down. The fiasco in Stormont was extremely painful. My God, they are playing games with people's lives, because others will die if they don't get it right.
"People like me realise we need our Protestant brothers and sisters as they need us. Most of us work together with no problems.
"We have seen so many of the world's long-standing disputes settled. Why can't it happen here?"
I walk up to the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, at the top of the hill. It's the size of a cathedral. Inside 200 people are attending mass, praying for the souls of the departed. Their faith brings them hope and comfort. It calms their anger when their head feels like exploding.
Malachy Keyes, whose daughter Donna Marie McGillion became a symbol of the town's resilience when she pulled out of a coma to walk down the aisle in this very church in March, explains how his faith gives him the strength to cope:
"We decided very early on that anger was no good. For who could we be angry with? Not God, because he did nothing wrong. He put us on earth, but we made a mess of it.
"We can't be angry with the police who were on duty that day, because they genuinely believed they had got the right message from the bombers. And to be angry with the bombers is pointless.
"We're never going to get the people who organised it - just the ones who drove the car and they are merely brain-washed half-wits. No human being in their right mind could kill children. God will deal with them when their time comes."
Omagh is ultimate proof that whatever happens in Northern Ireland, the men of violence have had their day. Omagh tells them that the more they bomb, the closer they will drive the people. They no longer have any stomach for death and destruction.
Last year's bomb may not be the last one planted in this tragic yet beautiful part of the world, but the spirit that emerged from the carnage is the ultimate snub to terrorist organisations.
Because the town's quiet defiance in the face of this unspeakable barbarity tells them they will never win.
And that intimidates the intimidators like no other weapon known to man. It is a human wall of unity they can never blow away.
So maybe, just maybe, those 29 people didn't die in vain after all.

Publisher: THE MIRROR

Ref: TM/096

Published Date: 14-Aug-99