SAOIRSE32

Belfast Telegraph
Friday 7, March 2008

A father whose son was killed in the Omagh bombing today welcomed the ruling that a new memorial to the victims of the atrocity will state they were murdered in a dissident republican attack.

Following a long battle, a number of bereaved families have finally won their fight to ensure the memorial stone says they were murdered in a “dissident republican terrorist car bomb”.

Omagh District Council last night accepted the report by an independent fact-finding group, headed by former Presbyterian Moderator Dr John Dunlop, and the memorial should be ready for the 10th anniversary in August.

Michael Gallagher, who lost his son Aidan in the 1998 attack, said he is glad the issue has finally been resolved.

“It has been a long drawn out fight. I think it could have been resolved at a very early stage. Common sense could have come into play here and we would not be talking about this now.

“The group that looked at this recognises that the truth should be shown there and that is something we are happy about.”

There will be three parts to the new memorial, with less contentious language used to describe the bombing on an engraving at the site of the explosion and on a wall leading to the nearby garden of remembrance.

The families’ preferred wording will be carried on a stone wall in the garden itself. The contentious sentence is: “To honour and remember 31 people murdered and hundreds injured from three nations by a dissident republican terrorist car bomb.”

The name of the group which represents many of the families, the Omagh Support and Self Help Group, will be attributed to that particular section of the inscription.

It will form part of a longer narrative that describes in detail the events of August 15, 1998, and names all the victims.

Dr Dunlop said the length of the text enabled them to take into account as many people’s views as possible.

“This was a long narrative so we weren’t just faced with choosing between 20 or 25 different words,” he said.

“So we decided we were going to put a long story about what happened in the context of the day and in the context of the politics and in the context of what happened afterwards.

“The Omagh Support and Self Help Group represent some families but not all. The group have a particular form of words and we were faced with the decision on whether we were going to incorporate that into the narrative and we took the decision that that was something that we ought to do.”

Mr Dunlop, who held 80 meetings before finalising the report, hoped the narrative would be accepted by all the people of Omagh as a fair compromise.

BBC
07 March 2008

The former Northern Ireland Secretary of State Lord Pym has died aged 86 after a long illness.

Lord Pym held several cabinet posts during his long career

Francis Pym was Northern Ireland’s second secretary of state.

He followed Willie Whitelaw in the post but his tenure was of very short duration, from November 1973 to February 1974.

That period, however, included some of the peak periods of violence in the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

It also coincided with the opening of negotiations at Sunningdale to conclude a power-sharing peace settlement.

One of his first tasks was to swear in the power-sharing ministers, led by Brian Faulkner and Gerry Fitt.

His term in office was cut short by the defeat of the Heath government in a snap election in early 1974

He later became British Foreign Secretary during the Falklands War after the resignation of Lord Carrington.

His political career also included spells as defence secretary and as chief whip of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher.