The Omagh bomb.

My submission to the Omagh Bombing Inquiry, 2025.

This is a post about my experience of the Omagh bombing in August 1998. I submitted this statement to the Omagh Bombing Inquiry, an independent statutory public inquiry, established by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to investigate whether the bombing in the town of Omagh in August 1998 could reasonably have been prevented by UK state authorities.

My experience is in no way definitive, I don’t speak for anyone but myself. I recognize I cannot ever understand the unique individual and collective spectrum of losses, traumas and griefs of each person touched by this tragedy.

In writing this statement and posting it here on my Substack, I am simply giving voice to my 13 year old self. I am recognizing a formative event that continues to shape me today.

My statement will be read to the Inquiry on 17 February 2025.

Image of Omagh via Liam’s Landscapes.

I am grateful for the opportunity afforded by the Omagh Bombing Inquiry to record my experience of the Omagh bomb and its long-lasting impact on my life.

I experienced the Omagh bomb as a 13-year-old, shopping in Omagh town on 15 August 1998 with my sister, aunt, cousin and grandmother. On that weekend, my parents were in Galway on a short holiday. It was a Saturday like any other, and at that time, bomb-scares were not out of the ordinary in our lived experience. When, at around 3.00pm, we shoppers and workers were all told by the police to move towards Market Street, no one was panicked or scared. I caution not to speak for everyone else who was present on that afternoon, but my feeling was that we collectively assumed the matter would be resolved quickly and we could all go back to enjoying our Saturday.

It was only that my grandmother insisted we leave the Market Street vicinity that my sister and family were not physically harmed by the Omagh bomb. We walked to the Dunnes Stores car park and the bomb went off. I have since retraced the length of time would typically take to walk from Market Street to Dunnes Stores – it was approximately 3mins 30seconds.

My life has been divided into a time of living before and after the Omagh bomb. It was the end of childhood and the final loss of innocence for me. Even now, in 2025, I can viscerally remember the sound of the bomb, the strange electrical smell and haze coming from Market Street and the shocking silence in the immediate moments after the bomb. I remember the panic and fear in everyone’s movements after the initial blast – and I have a true understanding of the saying “your blood running cold”. It could have been minutes, or hours that we spent in the car park in Dunnes Stores. When the bomb went off, I fell to the floor and tried to hide underneath a car. The noise and shock subsided, and we all adjusted to the fact that something terrible had happened – I took on a “parent” role towards my younger sister who was screaming and crying in shock.

It is a shocking thing to see adults around you reduced to child-like figures as we all struggled to comprehend what had happened in the immediate moments after the bomb. Living through that experience and the slow-motion of it all is something that I believe embeds itself into your DNA. This feeling was affirmed when I read The Body Keeps the Score, and the following quote from Dr Bessel van der Kolk: “trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.” When traumatic events occur, like 9/11 or viewing the genocide in Gaza, I am re-traumatised - my blood once again runs cold, and my body feels the same way it felt on the 15 August 1998.

I was very lucky not to see any of the immediate disaster and destruction of the Omagh bomb with my eyes. My aunt and grandmother drove us away from the town and we stopped at a filling station on the Cookstown Road, pulling in there because we were all in shock. Mobile phones were in their infancy at this time, and in my “parent-mode”, I tried to call my own parents using a stranger’s phone – all the phone lines were down due to the chaos of the bomb. Finally, getting through to my parents and having to communicate with them that there had been a terrorist atrocity was a hugely traumatic experience.

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No-one knew how to cope with the death and destruction that was created by the Omagh bomb. My sister lives with extreme anxiety and jumps at the sound of loud noises. She experiences panic attacks when fire alarms go off. I firmly believe therapeutic resources and support have not been sufficient to support not just Omagh bomb survivors, but all those affected by the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

From my own perspective, the Omagh bomb has been an experience of deep upset, fear and silence – as a family and as a community, I feel many of us tried to bottle up or forget that horrific day. It introduced me, as a 13-year-old, to what I now know as an adult is a harmful concept of a hierarchy of grief. This was where I felt I wasn’t entitled or “allowed” to discuss what I went through on that day because it wasn’t a physical injury, and bringing up the bomb would upset others (e.g. my parents who weren’t there).

The silencing stigma the bomb forced on our individual lives and the wider community undoubtedly has fed into my self-esteem and depression issues, for which I am currently on anti-depressants and attend fortnightly therapy sessions for. My therapy sessions are self-funded due to lack of long-term therapeutic supports and lack of understanding that mental health issues related to terrorist atrocities manifest in a variety of ways. I am sure I am not alone in this predicament, and I would strongly advocate for free state-supported mental health treatments for all people living in Northern Ireland.

In the immediate post-WW2 era, literary critic Theodor Adorno wrote that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz”, and I think this is a salient observation about the impact of unspeakable evil on humanity. The Omagh bomb – as an act of unspeakable evil - created a chasm of bleakness, silence and horror that words are unable to quantify.

The Omagh bomb introduced me to the depravity of humanity, and the depths of sorrow. Going to leave flowers at the decimated Market Street in the days afterwards; knowing friends who were bereaved; people who were killed; missing the comforting and lovely coffee shop upstairs at Nicholl and Shiels; missing the shoe shop where I got my Clarks fairy princess shoes as a child… All of these memories and sadnesses and guilt and silence were and are a whirlpool of emotions and experiences that as a 13-year-old, I should not have experienced.

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In the years after the Omagh bomb, as the site was reconstructed, and you could still taste the building chalk in the air - the destruction became a strange site of normality. As a schoolchild at Loreto Grammar School, it was particularly eerie walking form the bus depot to school in the mornings when town was quiet, and it sometimes felt like it was just you and a horror site alone together.

The pattern of bomb-scares being telephoned in on an almost weekly basis at 3.25pm in 1998 and onwards absolutely exacerbated trauma and fear for myself and my schoolfriends and further went to illustrate the abject cruelty of humanity. This is not something that young people – or any people – should have had to experience.

I visited New York City in the years after 9/11 and experienced the same kind of atmosphere in Lower Manhattan as I did/do in Omagh. But unlike 9/11, I have felt that the Omagh bomb has often been swept under the carpet because it does not fit the good news story of the Good Friday Agreement. Sometimes I must remind people that the Omagh Bomb actually happened after the signing of the Agreement. It breaks my heart to see the bereaved and other survivors of the Omagh bomb have to fight for justice, for supports – they must fight to be seen. I see those people and they are in my heart, always. I don’t think it is a generalisation to say that really, Omagh has been forgotten about, and the community has been left to piece itself back together alone.

Growing up in my teens, the feelings of being unseen and not “entitled” to speak on the Omagh bomb and my experience of the blast itself marred what should have been a carefree and joyful time in my young life. Often, I would wonder why I survived the bomb and so many others died. I wrestled with understanding why my family decided to walk away from Market Street, when three minutes later we would have been killed. Sometimes I wish I had been killed, and others could have survived in my place. These thoughts and worries, panic and fear plagued my inner psyche – and continue to have a lasting impact on how I view myself and the world.

The guilt I felt at surviving the Omagh bomb has imprinted who I am at core. To this day, I jump at loud noises, experience that feeling of blood running cold when I see atrocities in the media, and carry with me the heaviness of the tragedy of Omagh – in a world that has just moved on. The lack of justice for the Omagh bombing has been another pain I and my community have had to endure.

There are no conclusions here – but I had to write this statement to communicate that the people of Omagh carry this indefensible act of terrorism with them every single day. Everything we do is coloured by the impact of the bomb. The futility of seeking justice, the evil carried out, and the lack of support and visibility for the people and families killed, injured and affected stuns me now as an adult.

My statement is a minor one – but it was important for me to state that the Omagh community has been irrevocably damaged and traumatised. Lives continue to be impacted by the bomb and the suffering will never go away.