Omagh from the outside

I remember 15th August 1998.
It was the end of my first week in my new job. I had been living abroad, but had come "home" to contribute to the building of peace.
We were taking two carloads of young adults, including some foreign visitors, to the Marble Arch caves near Enniskillen.
On our way home, we stopped briefly to stop in Erneside shopping centre. It's not a huge place, so there was little opportunity to lose each other. But we hadn't counted on the bomb scare. Forced out through different doors, and away from our agreed meeting place, I was feeling distressed that instead of peace, our visitors were seeing the old Troubles. Instead of experiencing Irish hospitality, they were in danger.

Eventually we found each other and started back Eastwards, passing signposts for Omagh on our left. I put the radio on, and we heard the early reports of the bomb there.
Numbness, the need to reassure our visitors whilst wondering where to put that old terror rising within... the need to check on relations in the town... then a kind of guilty relief that no one I knew seemed to be hurt. But tears, waves of tears, even as I write, for the unborn children, for the mothers, fathers, grandparents, husbands, wives, children, uncles, aunts, friends... Protestant, Catholic, Mormon. Unionist, Gaelic, Spanish.

This is a small place. Sometimes we might pretend it is otherwise, but when one suffers, we all suffer - one way or another.

I wonder... would the Peace Process have had the same support, had it not been for that day in Omagh. Would we be where we are? How far from the bombers' intentions... unless... (but I can't allow myself to imagine such a cynical conspiracy as that. Can I? Who can guess the motivations of people who would do such a thing?)

Police Questioning

Sean Hoey acquitted... So the survivors and victims' families from the Omagh bombing of 15th August 1998 still have no justice. Not that they would have had justice if he'd been convicted though innocent. In fact, no system of human justice can ever render true justice. Even like-for-like, eye-for-eye retribution will only ever give what the offender deserved, which is easier to bear than the injustices meted out to the victims... - That was my conclusion from watching Dead Man Walking years ago...

But what a mess for us all to live with. The police have so many questions to answer around the collection of evidence that one wonders... what will this do to our society's fragile respect for law and order?

[I heard this week of a policeman who bought his son a car, and said that there was no need to pay Road Tax until stopped and challenged about it. I hope, I hope that he was misunderstood or misquoted. I hope such cavalier attitudes to the law are not endemic.]

But my heart was warmed by the widower of an Omagh victim, who spoke today as a lawyer and said something to the effect that he believes in our system of Law and Order, and that although he is not happy for the victims at the outcome of Sean Hoey's trial, Sean Hoey is a human being with human rights, and those rights were protected from a miscarriage of justice today. Nonetheless, he reminded us, the victims' human rights were not respected. The implication was that as a society, we do not/should not reduce ourselves to the level of the terrorists. I can imagine that some of his family, friends and fellow victims can't agree with him; some will be angry that he still trusts such a system... but I thank God for his courage and integrity in holding to the higher good.

For every father teaching his kids to evade the law where possible, there will always be one living in integrity and instilling faith and hope.