Omagh

Tommy Sands

The fifteenth of August was the day we used to go to Warrenpoint to pray innocently and play in the water. There was a cure that day, they said.

But I was in Milwaukee when the word came through...

...just about to go on stage. It was a festive event with ten thousand in the audience. They had just heard the news too. No one felt like singing yet we knew there was no other way to express such sorrow. Eileen Ivers played a lament on the fiddle. Like a keening song of old, not to make us sad but to let the sorrow out. To bring back life. There was a silence I had never heard before. I sang "There were Roses" and the tears of the people ran together.

Omagh was a defining moment. If there had been any doubts before that we needed to support a peace process there was none now. The last straw. Out of the ashes came a prayerful permanence. Never again. Out of death, perhaps, a thousand lives were suddenly saved. Cured on Marymass by innocents, in Omagh, martyred.

Colin Bateman

Omagh was a horrible, horrible thing - but as the years go by, unless you were personally involved, it just gets added to the list of horrible atrocities that went before it.

I don't think there was any 'silver lining' or any shift in public perception, there will always be mad bastards who want to kill innocent people to make a point.

I kind of like the idea of the killers' children asking, 'What did you do in the war, daddy?' I'd like to hear that explanation.

Eoin MacNamee

The correspondances between the Omagh bomb and the Dublin/Monaghan bombings are striking, five years after one, thirty years after the other.

These were mass killings of profound political effect, and, certainly in the case of the latter, political intent. The relatives and dead are in each case alloted their role and refused any other. They face official indifference, incompetence and worse. There is a sense of other agendas being pursued. What is particularly striking is the way that both sets of relatives have been forced to adopt unconventional legal tactics to force conclusions-in one case, the inquest process, in the other the adoption of private prosecutions.

The parapolitical complexities which have dogged the North roll on, seemingly immune to change. There is no such thing as the agendaless dead, it seems, when it comes to the north eastern corner of the archipegelo. We're told to accept the future as bright, and history as being a cortege from which we are to avert our eyes. Don't enquire because you might find out the truth. And that would be the real catastrophe.

Eamon Hardy

As a documentary film maker I've traveled the world to record some very painful stories, the human scars of war, famine and conflict; the 13 year old girl gang-raped by soldiers in Bosnia, the Palestinian mother who'd just lost her children in an Israeli missile attack. Of all the grief I've been witness to, however, nothing has moved me more than the stories of the families in Omagh.

I was born and raised in the North of Ireland and still considered it home. I felt an instant and intimate understanding of these people's lives. Michael Gallagher was a man I knew style="margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px; float: left;" although we'd never met. His gentle, soft-spoken courtesy as he invited John Ware and myself into his home was that of family friends and relatives I had grown up around.

His hospitality too, gallons of well brewed tea and plates of thickly buttered barmbrack, was the taste of celebrations and even wakes from my own childhood. The familiar comfort of his 'good' room with its china cabinet filled with Belleek pottery and Tyrone crystal, could have been my mother's.

My heart was disadvantaged even before this dignified man told the story of how, after the bombing, he went to search for his son Aiden. He found him - in the mortuary.

Kevin Skelton's wife Philomena was caught by the blast as she sifted though the rails of a clothes shop. He found her face down in the rubble.

The Skeltons weren't well-to-do people but were remarkable for their ordinariness and decency. Kevin described with such love a quiet but energetic woman, always on the go. Her sounds were the sounds of his life.

I'll never forget the haunting description of his loneliness and grief. "It's an awful thing", he told us, "to walk into your home for the first time and hear the clock ticking." For a long time after recording Kevin I heard that clock's lonely echo.

Oran Docherty pleaded with his mother Bernie to allow him to go on a bus trip to Tyrone. He was only eight and had never been away on his own before. Bernie was reluctant but conceded in the end, as mothers do. After kissing him goodbye she stood at the door of her Donegal home to watch him disappear excitedly down the street. He hardly dared to look back in case his mum changed her mind.

The next time Bernie saw her son was in the mortuary at Omagh general hospital. Her description of seeing him in that moment wrenched the heart of every parent: "Whatever way his wee lip was, his bottom lip, to me it looked as if he was crying when he died".

I've always considered it a privilege to come into these distraught people's lives and give voice to their grief. I've often felt guilt. When the camera stops rolling and the lights go out our strange, fleeting acquaintance ends. We leave them alone with their broken hearts.

Peter Makem

The Omagh bombings are a perfect example of justice for sufferers and victim's relatives being at the mercy of the many interests and forces that have accumulated over the past thirty-five years. These include Secret Service, Special Branch, protection of agents, high legal costs and intimidation. Five years later the impasse is slowly beginning to unblock but only after the relatives themselves have taken vigorous control of their situation. Omagh, the worst atrocity of the entire troubles, has most shown up the inadequacy of legal redress.

My poem But We Were Drunk Then refers to incidents in history when people carry out acts they are later ashamed of and wonder what impulse drove them to it in the first place. The term "drunk" of course does not mean alcohol, but being temporarily carried away by intense ideals, impulses and beliefs. Sometimes when I think of Omagh, I feel I would like to read this poem out to the perpetrators.

But We Were Drunk Then

Cromwell fresh from Wexford town
And the dark set of blood.
Cromwell's reassembled throng,
Brattle of armour, strike of shod
Return to the camp, line by line
For prayers of thanksgiving,
For hymn and victory song,
And into sleep, and night's toss - Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.

Only should blinding light come
Would Pizzaro lament the Inca dead,
Or Titus mourn Jerusalem,
Or Herod grip his head in shame.
Only should light strike
Would Paul of Tarsus beg the dark
In skin locked at eyelid
And moan, and curse - Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.

Our piper's fingers shaped the ancient
Impulse of the race, a first cry
From first born, the story went,
Departing from a lover's balm
Moved off half soul, half body,
Tossed, twisting storm as calm
And every motion the possession
Of the vanished lover.
Our singers moved around that tune.
Dancers stepped it up the floor.

And dusk is full of beginnings,
High above the fulcrum
Beyond the starling and the plover
Glowing warrior and lover
Soar upon the shores of day
Until their wings fall away.
Only at the still pendulum
Might lips move, whisper pass - Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.

They live on Paradise, they
Moving under long oppression
Bring their flower in full blossom
Before the arc of dawn.
Rendered old, rendered young with pain
Stand attention to their dream,
And all that is not of Eden
Hated in the oppressor's way
All who should feed the root
Of the forbidden fruit,

And war it is. War the call.
The tidal surge won't turn
Until its moon is spent.
Prayers floats there, supplication
On the shore bound swell
And rock and great rock shaken.
After, the seas, the shrunken, penitent
Seas far out lap remorse - Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.


_{Reproduced with permission from Peter Makem.
© 2002 Peter Makem}