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27-August-1998 
98282 
    Omagh Blast Stuns Northern Ireland; 
    Clergy Support the Grieving 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.-When Father Michael Keaveny heard the low rumble of the 
explosion that killed 28 people and wounded 220 others in Omagh, Northern 
Ireland, Aug. 15, it didn't even occur to him that the noise might be a 
bomb. 
 
    Those days, he thought, were over.  Perhaps the rumble came, he 
surmised, from a nearby army barracks. It was more than a half hour before 
Keaveny heard what actually happened, since the blast knocked out the 
town's telephones. 
 
      A week and two funerals later, he's still trying to "catch up" with 
the 50 or so parishioners in Drumragh Parish that he estimates were injured 
in the worst sectarian killing Northern Ireland has seen in 29 years of 
violence. The bombing occurred just four months after republican and 
unionist voters overwhelmingly approved the Good Friday Agreement. 
 
    The Good Friday Agreement alters the province's political structure to 
give the republican, and typically Catholic, minority more authority and 
the Irish Republic more say in the government of Northern Ireland.  But it 
maintains the six-county province's historical ties to Great Britain. 
 
    The months of complicated political negotiating that went into the 
agreement were supposed to end the armed struggle that has plagued Irish 
politics for two centuries and to put the question of sovereignty in the 
hands of the province's voters - which now and for the foreseeable future 
is made up of a unionist and largely Protestant majority.  The agreement's 
provisions allow the northern six counties to be absorbed within the Irish 
Republic to the south only when voters mandate it. 
 
    "People here are mystified," Keaveny said, speaking of the car bomb. 
"Why?  The whole thing is so daft.  So stupid.  It makes no sense 
whatsoever.  Unfortunately, it's been a tradition in this country that 
people think that they can get things through violence.  It goes back a 100 
years.  But that day is gone. ... The whole thing changed with the Good 
Friday Agreement. 
 
    "It doesn't make sense anymore." 
 
     Omagh is a case study for how little sense it makes. 
 
    A predominantly Catholic town about 70 miles west of urban Belfast, 
Omagh is surrounded by dairy farms and even smaller villages.  The bomb 
killed and maimed shoppers who were running Saturday errands and buying 
clothes for the first day of school. 
 
    The Real IRA, a republican splinter group that broke away from the 
dominant provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) when the IRA backed the 
peace agreement, first took credit for and then apologized for the bombing. 
At presstime, both the Dublin and Belfast newspapers were printing that the 
Real IRA was expected to call an end to its violent campaign Aug. 27. 
 
    Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, condemned the violence shortly 
after the explosion. 
 
     But after days of wakes and funerals, the political climate of 
Northern Ireland was obscured by grief that is almost impossible to put 
into words. 
 
    "We just say nothing. We'd break down if we tried to say anything. 
It's at that level," said the Rev. Robert Herron, pastor of  Trinity 
Presbyterian Church, speaking of Omagh's 25 or so clergy who have been 
meeting together to coordinate all the competing demands of  visitations, 
funerals and other rites that are necessary.  "You just go, shake hands, 
embrace, cry with people. 
 
    "Crying, that's really the level we're at here," said Herron, who, 
though spared any funerals at his own 350-family parish, is spending full 
days of  provincewide hospital visitation. Interviewed by the Presbyterian 
News Service Aug. 17 at midnight, Herron was on his way out to another wake 
after "slugging back" a cup of tea.  Irish families traditionally "wake" a 
body by bringing it home and having neighbors and friends visit until two 
or three in the morning. 
 
      "As far as the town is concerned, we're at the sort of level where 
we're dealing with bodies coming home, getting to neighbors' homes and 
getting to hospitals, since many were flown by helicopter to Belfast or 
Derry, all the ends of the province," Herron said. "It's going to take some 
time for things at the community level to settle down, to realize what's 
going on here, what we're about." 
 
    Herron said lines of neighbors 30-40 meters long were still forming 
outside homes in Omagh at midnight, with people moving from house to house, 
sometimes moving just a few yards to reach the next coffin-filled sitting 
room. 
 
    In nearby Creevan, Presbyterian minister the Rev. Arthur O'Neill buried 
a father and a son, two of the four Presbyterians from there who died, and 
is now concerned about the ongoing emotional care of  "the utterly 
devastated" widow and mother who now lives alone.  Bryan White, 27, was 
buried with his father, Fred, 60, just two days after the young man was to 
begin a new job as a town horticulturalist.  Gardening was something both 
men loved, O'Neill said, adding that the father was a grower of daffodils 
that often won prizes in local shows. 
 
    "What we're doing here is listening.  Often you can't say anything, 
just listen to the suffering," said O'Neill, who has been marrying and 
burying generations of families in Creevan for 35 years now.  "I have two 
dead in my congregation, two with relatives who are dead, three members in 
the hospital in Belfast, two children in the hospital in Derry ... with 
injuries ranging from the loss of sight to multiple fractures. 
 
    "Just a tidal wave of sorrow has swept over me," said O'Neill, who says 
that the task now is to begin the "not so easy work of overcoming evil with 
good, as God would have it." 
 
    That's happening now in tangible but subtle ways.  There's no talk, 
clergy say, of being Protestant or Catholic - just a terrible sorrow about 
all of the loss. 
 
    "There's a great desire to be with one another, to say, `I'm sorry for 
your trouble.'  It's not to comfort yourself, but to comfort someone else," 
said just ordained the Rev. Ruth Adams of the over 500-family St. Columbus 
parish of the Church of Ireland. She says that members of her new 
congregation are offering her as much support as she's giving.  "Many knew 
each other very well [here] ... and I think hope does come from the way 
people show love. 
 
    "We're all getting strength from God in this time. People say that to 
me.  It's tangible." 
 
    The Omagh community, led by local clergy in the four historic churches 
- the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church, the Church 
of Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland - held a time of prayerful 
reflection Aug. 22 in the town center at exactly the time of the bombing 
the previous week.  A minute of silence was observed at 3:10 p.m. just 
after the names of the dead were read out loud.  Similar gatherings were 
held throughout Northern Ireland in solidarity with the people of Omagh. 
 
    The service was an attempt to begin moving as a community from what one 
pastor calls "total despair ... to a little bit of hope" - to unite the 
community, at least for the moment, around the cry "Never again!" 
 
    "It is an evil thing that happened," said Adams. "Evil is a thing to be 
angry about.  If we're not angry about evil, something is wrong ... but 
[what matters] is how we use that anger.  We can also pray for mercy and 
grace, for those harness evil. ... 
 
    "This is a great wee town and we can't let evil prevail when there is 
so much good," said Adams, who said few had heard of Omagh before the blast 
drew international attention there. Even her friends in England hadn't 
heard of the town when she accepted the call to her parish, she added.  "No 
one knew our wee town.  But I'm praying now that ... Omagh will be a sign 
of hope." 
 
    In 35 years of ministry, this is O'Neill's second pastoral encounter 
with the sectarian violence that has so dominated Northern Ireland's 
politics.  Earlier, he had buried a 24-year-old man who was ambushed on the 
road and shot dead in County Tyrone. 
 
    "The challenge," he said, referring to how wounds have historically 
festered in this conflict, "is not to let the forces of evil defeat the 
forces of good. ... We've got to think in terms of decades, not months and 
days. 
 
    "It has taken us 30 years to get a peace agreement," he said. "It could 
take us another 30 years to get it up and going." 

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