Perhaps, in time, the full transcripts of the testimonies given by family members of those killed to the public inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing will be published separately in book form. They should be, as for all the vastness of the library of the Troubles, victims have often felt crowded out, their experiences running like submerged streams beneath the dry, stretched land of blame, the dominance of militants and architects of a peace process, and the roles of state actors and agencies.
The families of those affected by violence have different views on the Omagh inquiry, but what they all hold sacred is the need for their loved ones’ stories to be heard and dignity afforded to them. The headlines will move to the issues of responsibility, intelligence reports, clandestine files and whether the bombing could have been prevented. But the shattering of futures remains the bleak backdrop.
The passage of time can shift dominant narratives. As was pointed out by Síobhra Aiken in her 2022 book about the Irish Civil War, Spiritual Wounds, “the many voices that broke the silence can no longer be overlooked. Civil wars engender vibrant bodies of competing discourses”. The “spiritual wounds” were the deepest, according to 1916 veteran and writer Desmond Ryan, but it took a century for those Civil War narratives to find a dominant place in the history books.
The appetite for Troubles-related drama remains strong, reflected, for example, in the success of the Disney+ drama Say Nothing, about the abduction and execution in 1972 of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 and the best known of the “disappeared”. But in reacting to that series, one of McConville’s daughters, Helen McKendry, pointed out it “didn’t show you the aftermath” of a family that cannot recover: “I never had any help at all.”
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The series is based on the book by Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland (2008). His title was borrowed from a Seamus Heaney poem, Whatever You Say Say Nothing, which refers to “the famous Northern reticence/ the tight gag of place”, a reminder of the suffocating silences that can blanket atrocities and their known perpetrators, and when, as Radden Keefe quotes a contemporary, “The people on the street know it. The dogs know it on the street.”
David Park, in his 2008 novel The Truth Commissioner imagined the words of the sister of a 15-year-old executed by the IRA for alleged police informing: “My mother went to the police station every week and they treated her like she was reporting a lost dog ... it was almost as if he never existed but he did exist and he was my mother’s son and our brother and we have a right to know, a right to have him back ... this curtain of silence fell around it and no matter how hard we tried we couldn’t get anyone to admit they knew anything”. Park’s Truth Commissioner Henry Stanfield “presided over some truth, but little reconciliation”.
Heaney’s poem also includes the line, “Yet I live here, I live here too”. The testimonies given to the Omagh inquiry are partly about that living or trying to live in the aftermath; they have been unvarnished and desolate. In 2010, an Omnibus Survey suggested 30 per cent of the Northern Ireland population had been directly affected by the Troubles, either through bereavement, physical injury or experience.
Trying to live after such trauma has involved anger, suicide, guilt, insomnia, alcoholism, marital failure and mental health breakdown. As the Omagh Community Trauma and Recovery Team observed in the immediate aftermath of the bomb: “The implications for mental health and wellbeing were a matter of concern, but poorly defined, and it was not known what the longer-term consequences would be.”
We have a stronger sense now of those consequences for the families. But the Omagh testimonies have also been presented in the absence of an overall forum for dealing with truth and reconciliation, with many who have suffered made feel they are obstacles or irritants. After a frustrating meeting with British prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009, Patsy Gallagher, the mother of Aiden, who died in the bombing, admonished him: “You only want rid of me.” As Marie Breen Smyth has characterised it, “the suffering of the past has become a site of political contest, and a politics of victimhood has become a war by other means, frustrating certain attempts to develop policy and support measures for those bereaved or injured in the conflict.”
The phrase “legacy issues” has become embedded in the narrative of Northern Ireland’s politics and Anglo-Irish relations. But what we have been hearing in recent weeks is just how wide the gap is between recognising and defining such issues and finding a way to do justice to their enormity.
