On this day, 25 years ago, not long after the ink had dried on the Good Friday Agreement, a car bomb exploded in the market town of Omagh in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland. The bomb had been set in the town’s busy main shopping area by dissident republican terrorists styling themselves as the ‘Real IRA’. The group had rejected the acceptance by Sinn Fein, the Provisional IRA’s political mouthpiece, that Irish unification could not be achieved by violence, and instead bathed a community in blood.
Twenty nine people were killed that day. It was a busy and sunny Saturday and the town, nestled in the foothills of the Sperrin mountains, was packed with shoppers and tourists. The warnings given ahead of the bombing were hopelessly inaccurate and led to victims being evacuated away from what was thought to be the target – the town’s courthouse – and into a killing zone that made it the worst single atrocity of the Troubles, a conflict people had fervently believed was over.
The shadow of dissident republican terrorism still hangs over Northern Ireland
Why is it so important to remember the victims of this attack? Twenty five years is, after all, an arbitrary measure of grief and loss.
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