Omagh

Seth Linder

Like the assassination of President Kennedy, everyone remembers where they were when they first heard of the Omagh bombing. I was driving with my wife through the Mourne Mountains in County Down, and I think the isolated beauty of our surroundings only heightened the horror of what we were hearing on the car radio. As with the Dublin and Monaghan bombs in the Seventies, it was partly the scale of the tragedy that appalled people but it was also the perception that what was really being targeted was hope. For the first time in thirty years, a peaceful future was a tangible if fragile possibility. Yet, it now seems as though the one consolation to be drawn from the terrible events of that day is that, rather than sabotaging that hope, Omagh led to a greater resolve throughout Northern Ireland to achieve that peace.

For those who lost family or friends or suffered injury and trauma there has been precious little to bring solace over the years. As a journalist, I have interviewed many who have endured similar tragedy, such as those who lost relatives at Hillsborough or Bloody Sunday. Like the Omagh relatives, I am sure, their search for the truth is an essential part of the grieving process. How can people be expected to finally let go until they feel they have achieved some sense of justice for those they have lost. It took a whitewash and thirty years of campaigning for the Bloody Sunday families to get their public inquiry. The Hillsborough families have not and probably never will receive justice. One could cite many other similar instances. With Omagh we have, yet again, failed as a society to make the one contribution we must make to lessen the burden for those who have suffered so terribly. We have failed to bring them the truth. It is still not too late for the Omagh relatives. I hope this drama helps their cause.

Richard Duffy

The Omagh of 2004 is not that much different to the town I knew before that awful day. That may seem strange, but before August 1998, I only heard about or watched on television the awful things happening around the province, I had never experienced terrorist violence close up.

Omagh to me, was always a place where people mixed in pretty much every way. There were bomb scares and the like but to our cost, they were seen as part of everyday life.

As a buyer for a clothing store, I was in London in the months after the bomb and there Omagh was known for only one thing - after all nobody had any reason to know us before. Now, however, for the first time, while on buying trips, I can say where I am from and the same blank expression appears on people's faces as did before 15th August 1998, quickly followed by the question 'How do you spell that?'

I see the Omagh of 2004 as the same market town it always was with the vast majority of people living side by side as before if not closer.

No one will, or ever should forget what happened that day and this programme will ensure that people do not. A day has not passed since that tragic day that I am not reminded in some way of what happened and I don't think that will ever change. I think that anyone who worked in the town and helped in the aftermath that day will feel as I do. The only thing that can come out of the bomb is that because it has happened, it will never happen again.

Dina Shiloh

In The Diameter of the Bomb Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote of the way one bomb kills and injures a specific number of people - those who happened to be a few centimetres from the explosion - and how the bomb's ripples of pain spread further and are felt by people all over the world. Amichai was writing of the conflict in his city, Jerusalem, but his words are equally resonant for the people of Omagh.

The effects of a bomb are not only felt by the families of those who happened to be there at that precise moment, but by their friends, their work-mates, the wider community. Nearly six years after the Omagh events, people in Ireland are still feeling the repercussions of the bomb, yet they have been able to move towards a peaceful resolution of their conflict. Perhaps they can give hope to those in Amichai's city, Jerusalem.

Paul Greengrass

There are two events that frame the Troubles: one was Bloody Sunday - the moment at which the progress towards conflict became unstoppable and Omagh, which marked the moment at which everyone knew the conflict had to end. The Omagh bomb remains the single greatest atrocity of the Troubles and was all the more tragic in that it happened at a time when the people of these islands were beginning to believe that the bloody conflict they had lived with all their lives might be coming to an end. Out of tragedy the families of the Omagh Support and Self Help Group have pursued a campaign for justice that symbolizes hope for us all. And it was important for me, having made the first film, to bookend the conflict with this one.

It's terribly difficult to make a judgement about the right time to make a film like this and obviously some families wish to grieve privately, but the families of the Omagh Support and Self Help Group have been in the public eye throughout the last five years, pursuing a legal campaign, shortly to come before the courts, with far reaching implications for all of us and it feels the right moment for them to be heard, to bring their story to a wider audience so we can all understand the courageous journey they have made.