Omagh bomb: Families mark 25th anniversary with private service

A private service for families and victims of the 1998 Omagh bomb will be held in the County Tyrone town to mark the 25th anniversary of the attack.

Twenty-nine people, including a woman pregnant with twins, were killed by the bomb planted by the Real IRA.

Following the service in Omagh library, prayers will be said at the scene of the bomb on Market Street.

Flowers will be laid at the glass obelisk at 15:10 BST, the time that the dissident republican car bomb exploded.

Tuesday’s event is being organised by the support group Families Moving On.

It follows a public service on Sunday which took place in the town’s memorial garden.

Kevin Skelton, the former chairman of the group, said he felt it was important to remember what happened at the site of the bomb.

He will lay a wreath to his wife Philomena who was among those killed on 15 August 1998.

However, he said this anniversary will be the last time he takes part in a public event linked to the bombing.

“We’ll say a prayer, I’ll lay a wee wreath at the memorial and that will be my thing done.

“It’s very hard to think that it’s 25 years,” he said.

“That will be my last contribution.”

Mr Skelton described the families’ campaigns for truth and justice as “a rollercoaster”.

“With a public inquiry coming up it’s going to drag it on and on and on,” he said.

“We’ve had so many false dawns, people charged and they walked and so many documentaries about what could’ve happened in the Omagh bomb and what didn’t happen.

“I’ve actually stopped watching the news. I’ve stopped buying newspapers so I just don’t bother anymore and to be honest it has helped me health-wise.

“I can sleep at night now when I go to bed and go to sleep without waking and that is a big change from what it was for the last 20 years before that.”

A retired member of the Red Cross, who helped victims on the day of the Omagh bomb, said that she and four other colleagues made a pact not to work in medicine again after that day.

“Nothing ever prepares you for that – carnage is not even the word for what we witnessed,” Ruby Sutherland said.

Ms Sutherland moved from Scotland to Londonderry in 1989 and helped to train and lead teams in the Red Cross.

She told BBC Radio Foyle’s The North West Today that she was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after trying to help those caught up in the blast.

“There was five of us who more or less swore that we couldn’t do medicine any more after that,” she said.

“We just honestly could not – the enormity of it was just so great on us and it affected our lives too much – that we just couldn’t and didn’t go back into medicine.”

Claire Radford, whose 16-year-old brother Alan was killed, said “every anniversary is very difficult”.

She said she would spend the anniversary with her family somewhere like the north coast where she has happy childhood memories of Alan.

“The 25th feels like the first, years may go on but but the trauma, everything is exactly the same,” she said.

“I still feel like I’m that 15-year-old girl, the pain of it has never went away, it never will.

“It’s just trying to over come every day, get up, get on with life as best as you can knowing that my brother was brutally murdered for absolutely no cause whatsoever.”

Ms Radford said she appreciates the support that is shown on the anniversary but she feels that that same community spirit is needed all of the year.

“It doesn’t just happen once a year, once a decade, or once every 25 years.

“We live and breathe this every single day and other innocent victims, like so many who have been affected throughout the years, need to be more at the forefront of peoples’ minds on a daily basis and not just whenever big events are happening. “

The Omagh families have a led a long campaign in a bid to bring those responsible for the bombing to justice, but no-one has ever been convicted over the attack.

The families have also lobbied the British and Irish governments to investigate whether they had sufficient intelligence to prevent the attack.

In February, Northern Ireland Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris announced the setting up of an independent statutory inquiry into the preventability of the Omagh bombing.

In a statement on the 25th anniversary, Mr Heaton-Harris said news of the bombing of Omagh “reverberated around the world” in August 1998.

“While responsibility for this appalling crime lies with the murderers and those that assisted them, it is important that all lessons are learned and that confidence in this is given to the families of those affected, and to wider society,” Mr Heaton-Harris added.