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OMAGH FIVE YEARS AFTER THE BOMB
BY ANTON ANTONOWICZ

We should be like the Americans and come down hard on terror
THE red Cavalier is parked on double yellow lines at the foot of Market Street, Omagh.
It is a chilling reminder of how much has been forgotten, how quickly people forget and how much has been ignored.
It was a red Cavalier, parked in the same place as this one, which exploded at 3.10pm on August 15 1998. The bomb killed 29 children, men and women, including one who was seven months pregnant with twins.
Another 370 were wounded. Many were blinded or lost limbs or suffered horrific burns in the worst terrorist attack to befall Northern Ireland.
Yet no one has been brought to book for murder. And an impatient man illegally parks his red Cavalier with no thought of the memory.
We walk on. Across Strule Bridge over the Drumragh. It is a beautiful river, ignored by the town whose building's turn their backs on it.
And then the Memorial Garden, a small place with no mention of why it is there. No plaque to commemorate that awful day. Just a round of roses, a red lantern, unlit, with the words "To Honour and Remember". And a small, tired bouquet from Liverpool Ladies Football Club - "Always in Our Thoughts" echoing memories of that other tragedy at Hillsborough.
Apparently the council will extend the site soon. "It is a small crumb of comfort," says Michael Gallagher, who lost his 21-year-old son Aiden.
"But it is no substitute for justice. Everyone knows the bombing was the work of the Real IRA. Within 10 days most journalists knew the identities of those people.
"We have seen inquiry after inquiry, yet not a single person charged. There have been major investigations north and south of the border. Nothing.
"It is as if 31 people can be murdered just because these people are powerful enough to get away with it.
"Can you imagine the situation in America after September 11? Do you think the Americans, knowing the identities of the people responsible, would ever leave them unprosecuted? There's in a reluctance among governments in this part of the world to come down hard on terrorism.
"There is an all-abiding fear of jeopardising the Good Friday peace agreement. Why? Because ex-terrorists are involved. Both governments have gone overboard to underpin Sinn Fein. They give 'em offices at Westminster and help them over the step."
Mr Gallagher is chairman of the Omagh Victims Group, which is bringing a civil suit for damages against five men they claim are responsible. They have raised and spent £1 million preparing the case. Bob Geldof and former Northern Ireland Minister Peter Mandelson have given time and money. Another £500,000 is needed to bring the action to court. The families are still fighting for legal-aid payments. Two of the men they are suing have been granted it. This year the families were refused a £120,000 grant from the Community Relations Council for office staff. But Relatives For Justice received £155,768. The group represents republican families. Its website features IRA activists who, it says, were "victims of a British shoot-to-kill policy".
Michael shakes his head and remembers. "Aiden was a lovely boy. Tall, 6ft 2in, 14 stone, gentle. He had started his car body-panelling business. He was full of plans for doing up our old house.
"He went into Omagh that Saturday to buy a pair of jeans. And then he's gone. A body in the mortuary.
"There are people who'd say his death has consumed my life. Truth is that I tried to get on with it, but I found myself consumed by the need for justice and I have embraced it. I owe it to Aiden. I owe it to other families that there should not be another Omagh." He is angered by the lack of an inquiry into security that day. There had been phoned warnings. The first said the bomb was near the courthouse at the top end of the street. Then it was 200 yards away. And then it was in the vicinity. Unknowingly, the police ushered Aiden and so many more into the kill zone, beside that red Cavalier.
"That inquiry must be held," says Michael. "We even know the man who stole that red Cavalier. Why has he never been charged with providing what was, in effect, the murder weapon? And why has the inquiry into police intelligence at the time still not made its findings public, eight months after it was due to report?"
Michael has asked to meet Tony Blair and Eire's leader, Bertie Ahern. Apologies, but nothing. His wife Patsy - whose brother Hugh, 26, a taxi driver, was murdered by two IRA gunmen in 1984 - wrote to Mr Blair. Again, a charming handwritten apology. But nothing.
A few weeks ago Michael saw Michael McKevitt, the alleged founder of the Real IRA, who is on trial in Dublin for directing acts of terrorism. He is one of the families' named men but he denies the charges. Mr Gallagher was told his group would have to pay £40,000 for the trial transcript. No special deals for victims.
"It was the first time I saw McKevitt in the flesh," he says. "He looked older than I thought. Dressed up. He could have been a lecturer or a doctor, a professional of some sort with a folder, taking notes."
A B-reg Toyota MR2 is parked outside Mr Gallagher's bungalow. It is white, rusting car his son parked in Omagh that day. Dad has no plans to sell it, or the VW Beetle Aiden renovated or the 1958 red Berkeley racer covered in shrouds.
We meet Billy Jameson, 63, shown on television that day clutching a couple of bags of bloodied clothing. "This is all I'm left with," he said then.
His 11-year-old son was not dead. Nor his wife. But the soundbite was devoured by a hungry world.
"There was blood pissing out of my boy's head. His foot crushed. Ursula, my wife, was screaming for morphine and for him. They didn't die. But good days, bad days. It is how we survive."
Godfrey and Ann Wilson lost their daughter Lorraine, 15. The couple live in an estate of painted red, white and blue flagstones and loyalist flags.
Neither has any faith in God or his denominations. Protestant, Catholic, whatever.
Each flag and flagstone is spit upon their daughter's memory.
The Wilsons lost their first-born, a boy, when he was three months old. Then Lorraine, shepherded like Aiden into the bottleneck. "We're in Zeroland," Godfrey, 46, says. "Five years and nowhere. In that first year we met Blair and Clinton, both saying they'd leave no stone unturned." "Does your head in, doesn't it? People don't realise what happens behind the closed door.
The others round here can put out flags, but we inside crumble under their noses. All we want is justice. Without it you cannot have peace.
"That is the lesson the governments, British or Irish, cannot understand. Without justice, no peace. No peace, no future." Gerry McFarland, 66, lost his daughter Samantha. "People tell you to move on. But move on where?
"We know that bomb should never have happened.
"The authorities had warning more than a week before it exploded. Because of the peace agreement the soldiers were kept in their barracks. There were far less police than normal on the streets.
"And me? I lose a wonderful, bright girl who was working Saturdays for Oxfam because she wanted to help people."
Edith White, 60, remembers searching for her husband Fred, 66, and son Bryan, 27. Then her memory blanked for three days. She next recalls the minister knocking on her door, telling her he had brought Fred and Bryan home. They were in coffins.
The priest and Edith unscrewed the lids so she could identify them. Then her mind went blank a second time. No memory of burying them.
She no longer attends church. She never sets foot in Market Street. She shops anywhere but Omagh.
In Bryan's room there is a photograph of him and his father in Orange Order sashes.
A FLAG, the Red Hand of Ulster, adorns his bedhead. His mother smiles thinly. "It was a cultural thing," she says. "Neither of them were political."
She was kneeling at their country grave beside the river, when a man in black, followed by 20 more in twos, marched past her to lay a republican wreath on the tomb of Alice Milligan, poetess and Sinn Fein heroine, whose headstone reads: "She loved no other place but Ireland".
We travel on to Aiden's graveside in Knockmoyle cemetery. It has fine views to the mountains.
You pass the house of Sean McGrath, 62. A wheel from the red Cavalier was embedded in his chest. He took three weeks to die.
Just down the hill lives a girl who lost a leg when part of the engine hit her.
Michael Gallagher stoops beside his son's marbled grave. Adjacent to it is that of John O'Connor, Aiden's grandpa.
The two shared the same birthday, October 2, John died 10 days after Aiden. He had barely uttered another word in that time.
Counsellors have seen 720 troubled people since the bombing.
They expect to see another 800 at the Trauma Centre in the next three years.
The longer people go without help, the harder it is to help them. And, all the while, there is that anger. The pain of justice unresolved.
"Literally and figuratively, that bomb ripped the heart out of Omagh." says centre director David Bolton.
The bomb was indiscriminate in the religious make-up of its victims: 60 per cent Protestant, 40 per cent Catholic.
Many more were wounded, more unscathed, forced to re-examine their political and religious views.
While anniversaries come and go. Politicians come and go. Michael McKevitt refuses to take any part in his trial, claiming it is political.
And the grieving are left to grieve and seethe alone. People whose loss has still not been fully acknowledged.
People wanting justice.
a.antonowics@mirror.co.uk
o If you want to help the victims' legal campaign, please send cheques to: Omagh Victims Legal Trust, Bank of Ireland, Omagh, County Tyrone.