WITNESS TO A HORROR THAT JILLETED MY TOWN
Witness to a horror that filled my town
Grief starts to sting as I watch the Omagh film. It emerges initially as a subterranean uneasiness where I'm gripped by the urge to switch off, change channels, do something else. Anything at all.
It makes for troubled viewing, you see, this depiction of my home town as a Garden of Eden about to be transformed by the Fall. When that collapse arrives in the guise of a 500lb car bomb, a nauseous sensation flutters in the pit of my stomach.
Like that moment in a horror film where you cower behind the sofa shouting 'don't go in there' as a character investigates suspicious noises, you know what's about to happen. And there's no possibility of averting it. No way of tweaking the trajectory of events to save those 29 doomed souls, one of them heavily pregnant with unborn twins.
It seems surreal that I'm sitting in my house in Dublin watching Omagh. I'm drawn closer and closer to the television set, until I'm perched so near I could stretch out my hand and touch the courthouse, the hospital, the leisure centre where haunted people waited for confirmation of their midnight fears. Indeed, at one point I do trace my fingers across the facade of Kells' shop, so vividly is the town recreated.
Outside my front door a foghorn blasts across the bay, teenagers laugh on their way to meet friends, but none of this has any basis in reality the only truth is unscrolling indoors where sirens shriek, mothers weep, a community mourns.
No, there's scant pleasure to be had in tuning in to Omagh. But perhaps there's an obligation to view this profoundly moving, sensitively-handled film. To bear witness to a cataclysmic event which filleted our town, shocked it to its core, but ultimately was denied the chance to submerge it.
The dramatisation reminds me how random was the ill-chance which seized friends, neighbours and co-workers that day. How it hovered, malevolent arbiter, above two people standing side by side and felled one but spared the other.
That's the point at which the sorrow I'm experiencing is joined by another emotion, the pungent swell of guilt. The film acts as a cue that my family was spared and that our good luck was haphazard, as indiscriminate as the misfortune which engulfed so many other families.
Most of us have moved on in these six intervening years most of us have been allowed to claim that luxury. But not the relatives of the 29, nor those hundreds who were maimed physically and psychologically by the explosion.
We have immersed ourselves in the minutiae of daily life again we have returned to enjoying the present, planning for the future. But Omagh, the film, jogs my memory that this ability to take the humdrum for granted is a gift denied to many alongside us; our neighbours, who must live with absence. And whose dignity in the face of the unimaginable made me proud to claim Omagh as my point of origin, in the aftermath of that explosion.
Still, I take exception to the way Omagh has entered the lexicon as a shorthand description for atrocity I resent how the carnage spewed out on that sizzling August day is often the only fact some associate with the area.
'Omagh's a friendly market town.' I protest. 'It's a courteous place - people nod at strangers in the street.'
'Are they over the bomb yet?' I'm asked occasionally and I hesitate.
'No,' honesty compels me to admit, 'it will take at least another generation before that can happen.'
Still, as I watch Gerard McSorley's perceptive representation of Michael Gallagher, with Lorcan Cranitch as Stanley McCombe two courteous men whose humanity has never flagged and see the tenacious efforts of all those other relatives who have been pressing their civil suit, I am struck by this.
They have forged a sense of community from the smouldering shards of tragedy, one which transcends traditional differences. No consolation for loss, I recognise no solace for the lack of a wife to grow old with, a mother to tuck you in at night, a son to work alongside you.
But an inspiration to the rest of us. Not just in Omagh but across the wider community.
Martina Devlin is an Omagh journalist and author living in Dublin. Her latest novel, Temptations, was published this month by Poolbeg Press.
Grief starts to sting as I watch the Omagh film. It emerges initially as a subterranean uneasiness where I'm gripped by the urge to switch off, change channels, do something else. Anything at all.
It makes for troubled viewing, you see, this depiction of my home town as a Garden of Eden about to be transformed by the Fall. When that collapse arrives in the guise of a 500lb car bomb, a nauseous sensation flutters in the pit of my stomach.
Like that moment in a horror film where you cower behind the sofa shouting 'don't go in there' as a character investigates suspicious noises, you know what's about to happen. And there's no possibility of averting it. No way of tweaking the trajectory of events to save those 29 doomed souls, one of them heavily pregnant with unborn twins.
It seems surreal that I'm sitting in my house in Dublin watching Omagh. I'm drawn closer and closer to the television set, until I'm perched so near I could stretch out my hand and touch the courthouse, the hospital, the leisure centre where haunted people waited for confirmation of their midnight fears. Indeed, at one point I do trace my fingers across the facade of Kells' shop, so vividly is the town recreated.
Outside my front door a foghorn blasts across the bay, teenagers laugh on their way to meet friends, but none of this has any basis in reality the only truth is unscrolling indoors where sirens shriek, mothers weep, a community mourns.
No, there's scant pleasure to be had in tuning in to Omagh. But perhaps there's an obligation to view this profoundly moving, sensitively-handled film. To bear witness to a cataclysmic event which filleted our town, shocked it to its core, but ultimately was denied the chance to submerge it.
The dramatisation reminds me how random was the ill-chance which seized friends, neighbours and co-workers that day. How it hovered, malevolent arbiter, above two people standing side by side and felled one but spared the other.
That's the point at which the sorrow I'm experiencing is joined by another emotion, the pungent swell of guilt. The film acts as a cue that my family was spared and that our good luck was haphazard, as indiscriminate as the misfortune which engulfed so many other families.
Most of us have moved on in these six intervening years most of us have been allowed to claim that luxury. But not the relatives of the 29, nor those hundreds who were maimed physically and psychologically by the explosion.
We have immersed ourselves in the minutiae of daily life again we have returned to enjoying the present, planning for the future. But Omagh, the film, jogs my memory that this ability to take the humdrum for granted is a gift denied to many alongside us; our neighbours, who must live with absence. And whose dignity in the face of the unimaginable made me proud to claim Omagh as my point of origin, in the aftermath of that explosion.
Still, I take exception to the way Omagh has entered the lexicon as a shorthand description for atrocity I resent how the carnage spewed out on that sizzling August day is often the only fact some associate with the area.
'Omagh's a friendly market town.' I protest. 'It's a courteous place - people nod at strangers in the street.'
'Are they over the bomb yet?' I'm asked occasionally and I hesitate.
'No,' honesty compels me to admit, 'it will take at least another generation before that can happen.'
Still, as I watch Gerard McSorley's perceptive representation of Michael Gallagher, with Lorcan Cranitch as Stanley McCombe two courteous men whose humanity has never flagged and see the tenacious efforts of all those other relatives who have been pressing their civil suit, I am struck by this.
They have forged a sense of community from the smouldering shards of tragedy, one which transcends traditional differences. No consolation for loss, I recognise no solace for the lack of a wife to grow old with, a mother to tuck you in at night, a son to work alongside you.
But an inspiration to the rest of us. Not just in Omagh but across the wider community.
Martina Devlin is an Omagh journalist and author living in Dublin. Her latest novel, Temptations, was published this month by Poolbeg Press.
Further Information
Publisher: ULSTER HERALD
Ref: UH/1666
Published Date: 27-May-04
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