The Omagh Bombing Inquiry is harrowing – but we all need to listen. Here's why

On 15 August 1998, at 3.04pm, a red Vauxhall Cavalier exploded in Omagh town centre. It carried a 500lb bomb. Twenty-nine people, including Avril Monaghan, who had been expecting twins, were murdered. Avril Monaghan’s mother Mary and daughter Maura were also killed that day. Maura was 20 months old. 

In addition, some 220 people were injured. It was the deadliest single attack of the Troubles. In many ways, it was the ending of that time. How could it not be? The Real IRA, a dissident group who did not accept the reality of the recent, hard-won peace agreement, admitted responsibility for planting the Omagh bomb. To date, nobody has been criminally convicted of carrying out the atrocity.

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In the years following, there have been claims of foreknowledge and negligence from the authorities over what information they held, how things could have been different and whether informers were protected rather than lives saved.

Throughout that time, families of the dead have pursued civil actions against a number of people identified as being behind the bombing. Nothing has properly stuck. They have also sought a public inquiry. The need to learn the truth has guided them, much of it led by a remarkable man called Michael Gallagher. His son Aiden, a 21-year-old mechanic, had gone shopping with a friend for boots and jeans on that Saturday. His last words to his father were “I won’t be long.” He never returned.

Just over a fortnight ago a public inquiry into the bombing was finally opened. It was given the go-ahead by Chris Heaton-Harris, then secretary of state for Northern Ireland, in 2023. He was the 14th person in that job that petitioned for an inquiry. He was a “breath of fresh air” who listened to the families, said Gallagher. 

Led by Scottish peer Lord Turnbull, the scope of the inquiry is straightforward – to establish whether the bombing “could have been prevented by UK state authorities”.

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It is early days in the inquiry and it is not yet diving into the dark truth of what some people knew, and what they prevented being known. But it is at an essential moment. The families of the Omagh victims have been paying tribute to their loved ones. It is a hard listen, but I think we should all pay attention. 

“I may not have many years left and like many people in life we don’t always get to make the choices that we may have wished,” said Michael Gallagher. “I did not make the choice on 15 August 1998 to have to go to a makeshift mortuary to identify my son.”

He said the door on Aiden’s room was closed that day, with everything how he left it, his tools and projects, untouched until they rotted and fell apart.

“His chair would remain empty and part of us empty too,” said Gallagher. Aiden’s sister Cat’s testimony was equally heartbreaking, about the loss of her brother; about praying that the reality wouldn’t hit. She felt guilt about smiling in the time that followed in case people thought she’d forgotten Aiden. It is nearly 30 years on. When they speak, it’s yesterday. 

And so it is for all the families unable to reconcile that sudden cutout space. Every single story is freighted with a personal grief, one that is now shared with all of us.

I was living back in Belfast on the day of the bombing and remember the sense of numbness that covered everything, an invisible fallout. I was born into the Troubles, came of age during them and like all my generation, all of us, was moulded by the events. We became inured in our own way, to nighttime checkpoints, to whether to leave a building during a bomb scare, perhaps to family members or friends arrested or accused. We made calculations through the day of what reprisals would come following a particular attack the night before.

This is not a normal way to grow up. We are left with that dark phlegm of memory and damage that can rise unbidden when we least want. But even within that framing, the Omagh bomb was a different sort of horror. 

Nothing can change the past. But the future can be influenced, if people allow it. There is a power in the testimony of those left ruined by inhumane acts. If the words of the families broken by Omagh are listened to, properly listened to, if others like them, in any number of other public remembrances that are live now, are heard, there is a chance that dark decisions that some may take in the future can be changed.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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