Harrowing does not even get close to describing the impact of hearing over recent weeks the evidence from the bereaved, the wounded, the survivors, the first responders and others caught up in the Real IRA Omagh bombing of August 15th 1998.
The Omagh inquiry is tasked with establishing whether the dissident republican attack which took the lives of 29 people – including that of Avril Monaghan, pregnant with twin girls to be called Eimear and Evelyn - could have been prevented. For that question to be answered will require forthright assistance from the likes of MI5, GCHQ and Garda intelligence along with, as has been pledged, full cooperation from the Irish Government. There will be no aid from the perpetrators and those who dispatched them on their murderous journey across the Border to Omagh.
But that is for the months ahead. These past four weeks were about the bereaved, the maimed and injured, and the police, fire officers and all the others who tended to the dead and wounded, telling their terrible stories.
There were tragic accounts of love and loss, of the lacerating hurt inflicted on innocent people spending what they thought was a normal, peaceful sunny day in a Co Tyrone market town. It offered such a true and potent insight into what the “horror of the Troubles” really means.
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And there were stories of hope and heroism, of people still carrying deep scars but who would not bow down under such inhumanity, and demonstrated the resilience of the human spirit. Perhaps this bearing witness will offer some consolation.
The stories of Omagh are the Troubles in microcosm. How powerfully they demonstrate the tragedy and futility of 30 years of violence when there was a peaceful way forward. In Omagh each story we heard is reflective of each individual story of the 3,700 people killed and the tens of thousands maimed and injured – and the many thousands more bereaved and psychologically damaged during the conflict. Those stories must not be forgotten.
