SAOIRSE32

BBC
16 August 2008

**Music video onsite

Ronnie Drew, the legendary Irish folk singer and musician, has died at the age of 73, his family has announced.

Drew, the founder of The Dubliners, had been battling ill health for some time.

A tribute song to Ronnie Drew was recorded earlier this year

In a brief statement, his family confirmed he passed away at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Dublin at 1400 BST on Saturday.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen said Drew had been an “iconic figure in Irish music” over five decades who would be remembered worldwide for his music.

“I met him and admired his music, his unique singing voice was loved by so many people,” he said.

“Ronnie, whether as part of The Dubliners or during his solo career, will also be remembered for his promotion of Irish music both at home and around the world.

“He bore his illness with bravery and will be sadly missed.”

Drew underwent six months’ treatment for throat cancer two years ago.

His wife of more than 40 years, Deirdre, died last year. The couple lived in Greystones, Co Wicklow.

He is survived by his two children and five grandchildren.

Drew’s family said he passed away peacefully while they were at his bedside.

“The family are very grateful for all the letters of support and wishes during the term of Ronnie’s illness,” they said in a statement.

They also thanked Professor Crown and the entire medical staff of St Vincent’s Private Hospital.

Con Kavanagh, barman at O’Donoghues, where The Dubliners started out, said everybody gathering at the pub this evening was talking about Drew.

“When you mention Dublin, you mention Ronnie Drew - the two just went together,” he said. “Everybody loved him.”

Republic of Ireland president Mary McAleese said it was with great sadness that she learned of Drew’s death.

“Ronnie was a champion of traditional Irish music and, with The Dubliners, he re-energised and refreshed our unique musical heritage,” she said.

Pub beginnings

During his career, Drew recorded with many artists, including Christy Moore, The Pogues, Antonio Breschi and Eleanor Shanley.

Earlier this year, members of U2 joined fellow Irish musicians Sinead O’Connor, Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore and others to record a tribute song The Ballad Of Ronnie Drew.

All profits from the release of the single went to the Irish Cancer Society.

Ronnie Drew performs The Irish Rover with The Pogues on Top of the Pops in 1987

Speaking at the time of the recording, U2 frontman Bono said: “Ronnie is like the King of Ireland, and we are his subjects.

“This is a big fight for him. But like any fighter, it’s easier if there’s a crowd cheering.”

Drew founded the Ronnie Drew Group in 1962, which later came to be known as The Dubliners.

The group included fellow Irish music legends Luke Kelly, Ciaran Bourke and Barney McKenna and they began by singing in the O’Donoghues pub in central Dublin.

Kelly was known for singing their soulful ballads and Drew will be best remembered for his gravelly-voiced renditions of songs like Finnegan’s Wake and Dicey Reilly.

Drew sang one of the band’s biggest commercial hits, Seven Drunken Nights, and the band appeared on the BBC’s Top of the Pops.

They later appeared again on the show with Shane MacGowan and the Pogues to perform the single The Irish Rover.

BBC

The home of a female district policing partnership member in County Londonderry has been attacked with a petrol bomb, it has emerged.

The device was thrown at a shed at independent member Yvonne Hutchinson’s home at Leckagh Drive in Magherafelt at about 0130 BST on Friday.

Officers attending the scene were also then attacked with bricks and stones.

Policing Board chairman Sir Desmond Rea described the attack as “cowardly and despicable”.

“All members of DPPs work hard for our community and make a significant contribution to policing and the safety of our community,” said Sir Desmond.

“The fact that officers who attended the scene were also attacked is appalling, and I am relieved that no-one was injured.

“The people who are responsible for this have nothing to offer our society and such attacks achieve nothing.”

Belfast Telegraph
16 August 2008

One rain drenched wall in Omagh’s memorial garden yesterday evoked the terrible aftermath of a decade ago, when the town began counting its dead.

“That evening,” the inscription on it says, “a great silence descended on the town.”

Floodlights illuminate the Omagh Memorial Garden last night following a silent tribute to the victims earlier in the day to mark the 10th anniversary of the bombing

A heavy stillness returned to the streets of Omagh yesterday at ten past three, exactly 10 years after the car bomb attack that devastated the town and became synonymous with it.

At that moment, shortly after the anniversary memorial service began, a moment of silent remembrance stilled the hundreds of people gathered by the garden in Drumragh Avenue and straggled in two lines along Market Street, where the bomb exploded.

Heavy rain fell on a crowd that was as varied as the one struck down in 1998. There were shopgirls and men in suits, lads in football tops, old women and toddlers who shook the crash barriers, no more aware of what was happening around them than little Breda Devine or Maura Monaghan would have understood the bomb alert moments before they were killed. Couples held hands.

And it was as incomprehensible yesterday as it was a decade ago — that someone would want to come to a place like this and kill indiscriminately.

Heavy, heavy rain fell on the town yesterday, but from about 2.30pm on, shops along Market Street began to close and people clasping umbrellas began streaming down to the garden by the River Strule.

Hundreds came, although perhaps less than expected. They stood to one side of a temporary stage that was edged in black cloth, while the dignitaries — including Taoiseach Brian Cowen, Secretary of State Shaun Woodward, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness and Junior Minister Jeffrey Donaldson — sat in rows of seats at the front.

There followed a service of solemnity but not great emotion, or perhaps stifled emotion. As the rain fell, the Omagh Waterford Peace Choir sang and messages were read out from Omagh, Buncrana — where the Southern visitors who died had come from — and Spain, the home of two of the dead.

Terry Waite, the former Beirut hostage, gave the address and referred obliquely to the frustration that many of the families of the victims feel because the killers are still at large.

“No one — I repeat, no one — who has experienced deep suffering will underestimate the power it has,” he said.

“It can blind individuals to reason. It can cause them to cry out for revenge. It can tear communities apart.

“How can it be managed? Some would say that justice is the answer, and indeed we should always seek for justice.

“However, we know that in a flawed and broken world, complete justice is hardly ever experienced. We do not live in a world where we can experience absolute justice.

“With justice as with so many other things in life, we frequently have to settle for something less than the absolute.”

John Hewitt’s poem, Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto, was read out by Ronnie Moran. It’s first and final line, “Bear in mind these dead” was repeated from Market Street. John McLaughlin, father of 12-year-old Sean from Buncrana, read it in Irish, Anna Abad Ramos, sister of Racio, read it in Spanish, and Caroline Martin, the sister of Esther Gibson, said it again in English.

The Duchess of Abercorn then read out the names of the dead, including Avril Monaghan’s unborn twin girls, Evelyn and Eimear. It took over two minutes to say them all aloud.

Then there were more songs and prayers, and more rain. The heavy clouds obscured what was supposed to be the climax of the ceremony. Children scattered flower petals in Market Street and walked to the memorial garden while a paper played a lament.

There, at the same time a glass obelisk was unveiled at the site of the bomb in Market Street, moving mirrors were switched on. They are designed to reflect sunlight onto the monument, but there was no sunlight to be had.

The weather provided its own terrible echo of 10 years ago, however. As the crowds moved back past the bomb site at the close of the ceremony, the colour ran from the petals and washed into the rainwater. Exactly 10 years after it happened before, Market Street ran red again.

BY MÍCHEÁL Mac DONNCHA
An Phoblacht
14 August 2008

THIS WEEKEND, people gather in Derry to commemorate the Irish republican prisoners who died on hunger strike. Foremost in their minds will be the ten who died in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh between May and August 1981 but they will be paying tribute to all 22 republicans who followed to death the agonising path of the prison protest fast.
The use of hunger strike as a form of resistance in 20th century Ireland began with James Connolly and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. They were imprisoned in Mountjoy Jail during the Great Lock-out of 1913 and were released within days of commencing their fast. In England, forced feeding was used against the Suffragettes, the campaigners for women’s rights. The medical profession at that time was unsure how long a person could endure without food and forced feeding was used as a form of torture as well as to stave off what was thought would be early death from starvation.
It was after the 1916 Rising that the prisons really became battlegrounds in the struggle for Irish independence. There could be no pretence that the hundreds interned without trial after the Rising in Frongoch Internment Camp in Wales were not political prisoners but in other jails attempts were made to criminalise the Irish prisoners. In 1917, one of the senior surviving leaders of the Rising, Tomás Aghas, was arrested and held in Mountjoy. When the governor attempted to impose a strictly criminal regime Aghas embarked on a hunger strike and was forcibly fed. He died from the effects of forced feeding on 25 September 1917. Refusing a request from the Lord Mayor of Dublin to end his fast, Aghas said:
“No. They have branded me as a criminal. Even though I do die, I die in a good cause.”
Tomás Aghas was the first of 22 republican prisoners to die on hunger strike in the 20th century. In most cases they were resisting criminal treatment.
In March 1920, Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, had succeeded his predecessor Tomás Mac Curtáin who was murdered by the RIC. On 12 August that year MacSwiney was arrested and imprisoned in England. He undertook a hunger strike and died in Brixton Prison, London on 25 October 1920. Because of his elected office and the location of his fast in London where the world’s press was based, MacSwiney’s sacrifice drew unprecedented international attention to Ireland.
A young Ho Chi Minh, later leader of the Vietnamese revolution, wrote of how, as a young man working in London at the time, he was inspired by MacSwiney’s courage. The streets of London and Cork were thronged for the funeral and the British hijacked the coffin, taking it directly to Cork to prevent an even larger turnout in Dublin which was on the intended route.

CIVIL WAR

Less well remembered are MacSwiney’s comrades on hunger strike in Cork Prison – Michael Fitzgerald of Fermoy, who died a week before him, and Joseph Murphy of Cork City, who died on the same day as MacSwiney.
Two more Cork men died on prison fasts but this time their jailers were their former comrades.
By the summer of 1923 there were 11,000 republicans interned by the Free State in the aftermath of the Civil War and they struck for release. Denis Barry of Blackrock and Andy Sullivan of Mallow died during the fast of republican prisoners in the autumn of 1923. Joseph Whitty of Wexford town was the third republican to die on that mass hunger strike.
The effects of hunger strike have often led to premature deaths after release. One such was Austin Stack of Kerry who fasted for 44 days in 1923 and died six years later. In our own era, Pat McGeown fasted for 42 days in 1981 and his health never recovered. He died in 1996.
De Valera was a republican prisoner during the 1923 hunger strike, although he did not join it. By 1940 he was holding hundreds of republicans in jails and internment camps. Seán McNeela of Ballycroy, County Mayo, and Tony Darcy of Headford, County Galway, were senior IRA men and were imprisoned in Mountjoy. When attempts were made to introduce criminalisation, the republican prisoners called a hunger strike. The prisoners resisted attempts to take McNeela away for trial and they were attacked by prison guards and gardaí. Darcy and McNeela were moved to St Bricin’s Military Hospital, Arbour Hill, where they died on 16 and 19 April 1940.
Perhaps the most horrific fate of all the hunger strikers was suffered by Seán McCaughey of Aughnacloy, County Tyrone. Held in isolation in the high-security Portlaoise Prison, he embarked on a hunger and thirst strike in May 1946. The De Valera government could no longer use the excuse of the ‘Emergency’, which had ended the year before, for their treatment of this prisoner. At his inquest the prison doctor had to admit that he would not treat a dog the way McCaughey had been treated. He died on 11 May 1946 and received a republican funeral, being the first hunger striker laid to rest in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery.

ENGLAND

Like their fellow Mayo man, Seán McNeela, both Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg were active service IRA Volunteers in England.
Hunger strikes had won demands for republican prisoners in Crumlin Road, Belfast, in 1972, with political status being recognised by the British Government in June of that year. The situation was very different for republican prisoners in England. They faced isolation and brutality and their main demand was for repatriation to Ireland.
Michael Gaughan undertook a protest fast and was forcibly fed with the participation of prison doctors. He died on 3 June 1974 in Brixton Prison after 68 days. The scandal of the force-feeding of Michael Gaughan and other Irish prisoners compelled the British Government to end the practice.
Michael’s comrade, Frank Stagg, was to face even worse isolation. At one stage of his fast, his mattress was taken away and he had to lie on the spring base of his bed. Screws placed an empty coffin within sight across the landing from his cell. The Catholic Bishop of Leeds denied him the sacraments of the church. He died on 12 February 1976 and there followed the notorious hijacking of his body by the Fine Gael/Labour Government in order to prevent the same public display of support as that seen at Michael Gaughan’s funeral. His body was buried under concrete by the Garda Special Branch in Leigue Cemetery, Ballina, County Mayo,but within days thousands of republicans came to pay their respects and months later the IRA reinterred Frank Stagg in the Republican Plot beside Michael Gaughan.

CRIMINALISATION

Less than a month after Stagg’s death, the British Government officially began its criminalisation policy with the ending of political status for all prisoners convicted after 1 March 1976. As the Fine Gael/Labour Government buried Frank Stagg’s body under concrete in Mayo, so the British Government tried to bury Irish republicanism in the concrete tomb of the H-Blocks and Armagh Prison. The result is well known. Four years of resistance culminated in two hunger strikes, the deaths of ten republicans and the transformation of the struggle for Irish freedom.
Bobby Sands was very conscious of the legacy of the hunger strikers who preceded him. In his Prison Diary on 6 March 1981 he wrote:
“I may be a sinner, but I stand – and if it be so will die – happy knowing that I do not have to answer for what these people have done to our ancient nation. Thomas Clarke is in my thoughts and MacSwiney, Stagg, Gaughan, Thomas Ashe, McCaughey.
“Dear God, we have so many that another one to those knaves means nothing, or so they say, for some day they’ll pay… This road is well trod and he, whoever he was, who first passed this way, deserves the salute of the nation.”

By Joe Diamond
Belfast Media
Andersonstown News Thursday

LORD Mayor of Belfast, Tom Hartley, unveiled a mural on Saturday of last week to highlight the campaign for truth and justice by the families of those killed in the Ballymurphy massacre in 1971.
The new mural is at the bus terminus at the junction of the Whiterock and Springfield Roads, and following the unveiling around 200 people – including West Belfast MP Gerry Adams – joined the families for a walk for truth around the spots where each of the 11 killings took place.

Mural photo submitted to Indymedia.ie by andree.murphy at relativesforjustice dot com. The 1971 Ballymurphy Massacre Committee, c/o Relatives For Justice, 235a Falls Road, Belfast, BT12 4PE

Event organiser Liam Stone said: “We gave a brief run-down of what happened at each spot, and relatives of those killed spoke about what it meant to the families to have lost a family member.
“Each time we stopped local people came out and talked about their own memories of what happened.
“This is another stage in our campaign for a public apology and international investigation into the killings,” added Liam.
Lord Mayor of Belfast Tom Hartley said: “The campaign by the families goes on and this mural will play some part in publicising their long campaign.
“I commend them on their efforts and am proud to have been asked to unveil the mural.”
Eleven West Belfast residents were shot dead over a three-day period by rampaging British soldiers in Ballymurphy in 1971. Relatives of the dead want an independent international investigation into the killings and are demanding the British government apologises and admits those shot dead were innocent.
Some of the soldiers who took part in the killing spree went on to kill 14 civilians in Bloody Sunday in Derry six months later.

Tyrone Constitution

“We were not made for this,
Neither for the taking of our own,
Nor the darkening of the light.
For this, earth’s men and women were not made.
And now,
In love and hope,
To the suffering and the threatened
We pledge the living of our days.”

Irish Times
**Via Newshound
Friday, August 15, 2008

ELAINE BYRNE: Ten years after Omagh, have we in the South made any effort to understand our Northern neighbours?

‘I KNOW ALMOST nothing about it. I’m not at ease there. I’ve always felt a flush of relief recrossing the Border . . . North and South are worlds still largely unknown to each other.” So wrote the late Nuala O’Faolain in her January 1998 Irish Times column when she announced that she was moving to Northern Ireland to write her column. An Irish Times letter writer, not particularly encouraging of her decision, chastised Nuala for her “near total ignorance of all things Northern . . . the information gap Ms O’Faolain is off to investigate doesn’t exist.”

“Is Nuala O’Faolain really somebody to write about the North?” he asked.

Over the next eight months, Nuala proceeded to write about King William’s Orange Preserve Jam, a trip to the cinema to see Titanic and the personal ads in the Belfast Newsletter. She wrote about ordinary, everyday things. Nuala advocated a “new kind of journalism” for a new Ireland, which would get behind the “many facades of Northerners”.

Her final column for The Irish Times was written in the raw immediacy of the Omagh bomb. “What can we do to help?” she asked. “Well, we can approach the subject of Northern Ireland with more care and more humility. We can make a better effort to understand the place.”

In the 10 years since these words, what do Southerners really know about Northerners and vice versa? Have we in the South made any effort to understand our Northern neighbours or are we content in indifference? Do we really care about “up there”?

The 2006 Central Statistics Office figures show that 585,000 people from Northern Ireland visited the Republic. In the same period, just 277,000 people from the South visited the North. Twice as many Northerners visited the South even though the population of the North is less than half that of the South.

Almost as many people from the rest of Europe visited the North as did from the South. Why are people from the Republic reluctant to visit the North? What do we really know about each other?

This year, I participated in two reconciliation retreats with teenagers and twentysomethings directly affected by the Troubles from across the community.People were at different stages of forgiveness. Eoin believed that “if someone says ’sorry’ then we can move on”. Rachel was not so sure: “Does forgiveness come from within? If I’m to find a way to be able to forgive, it’s not one act of forgiveness, it’s many acts. There are days when you’re able to forgive, days you’re not.”

Joe thought that “people are keeping themselves in the past and people are being kept in the past”. Others asked why Ireland always sought to commemorate those who died for Ireland rather than those who lived for Ireland. Joan was weary of hearing how young people were the North’s future: “The future hasn’t been born yet, we’re the present.”

For those caught up in the horrific violence wrought by the Omagh bomb 10 years ago today, when they were just barely teenagers, there was a sense of something greater than themselves. Their life choices in the last decade were determined by that one day.

Eleanor was just 15 when her two schoolfriends were killed in the Omagh bomb. Subsequently, she exhibited some of her artwork in the Omagh Gallery, where the bomb exploded. “I had not set foot in there before, nor wanted to, but it was my way of saying sorry for what had happened to them.”

For Eleanor, the context, language and structure of remembrance tend to be formal, reflecting that something had happened without acknowledging the individual, private sense of grief.

She described her last 10 years as a journey which she expressed through her art.

“I hope people see the softness and detail in my art. The colours are deliberately muted. It’s not raw grief, but trying to process grief, trying to start again in a different place.”

The confidence, self-awareness and willingness to talk openly of those at the retreats was striking. But in these groups you will only find Northerners talking to each other. In the South, maybe, we believe we have done our bit. Fifty six per cent of us turned out to vote 94 per cent in favour of the Good Friday agreement. We consider that the conflict is not our problem but an internal one to the North.

Suzanne was straight up: “You don’t see yourselves in the South as part of the problem. You don’t engage with us.”

Nuala O’Faolain ended her last Irish Times column with these words: “Yet the fact is that Northern Ireland has been the most important thing about Ireland in my lifetime.”

Yesterday, on the front page of the local newspaper, the Tyrone Constitution, was the picture of the Omagh courthouse clock which was stopped at 3.10.

Befast Media
Andersonstown News Thursday
Editor

At a discussion during the West Belfast Féile last week, a former loyalist prisoner tackled the thorny question of why unionists are welcomed to take part in debate and dialogue in nationalist areas but there is no similar red carpet treatment for nationalists in unionist heartlands.
The loyalist activist attributed the lack of reciprocity to the different mindsets in the two communities. Nationalists, he said, viewed “the Brits”–as the enemy (and, by extension, loyalists as mere proxies) while unionists viewed nationalists as the enemy.
The thesis is flawed somewhat by the fact that “the Brits” are equally welcome to take part in peacemaking activities–witness the late Martin Meehan’s monumental engagement with a former Paratrooper in Ardoyne. However, it does go someway to explaining the present Mexican stand-off at Stormont.
While republicans and nationalists are willing to get down to business with unionists, to both bind up the wounds of the nation and deliver benefits to all, unionists are still locked in a war mindset.
In their hearts and minds, they remain committed to denying republicans and nationalists their right to exercise their electoral mandate. Given the size of that mandate and that powersharing is the only basis for government, agreed on every occasion from the Good Friday Agreement to St Andrews’, the unionist refusal to accept reality is a classic case of being in denial.
Or to put it another way:They want to have their cake and eat it. Unionists want all the gain of Stormont government without the pain of powersharing and all-Ireland structures.
And to sustain that dream of one-party unionist rule, nationalists must remain the enemy. So much for the war being over!
There are some among the DUP, who realise they can no longer live in the past, treating all nationalists as the barbarians at the gate. However, their voices are muted.
Instead, the public is treated to a daily diet of demands from unionist whingers–the latest a statement from the TUV’s Cllr Mel Lucas insisting that Ariel washing powder drop its sponsorship of the GAA!
Nationalists realise that First Minister Peter Robinson has to soothe the worries of his own constituency. That’s why there have been no voices raised against the proposal that he reach out to armed loyalism. Similarly, nationalists have taken with good grace the windfall of jobs and new investments which has descended on East Belfast since the return of devolved government in May 2007.
However, unionists should note that there is a limit to the patience of nationalists and republicans. Ultimately, if the First Minister continues to view his partners in government as the enemy then this brave experiment in powersharing is doomed.

Michael McHugh
The Herald
16 August 2008

Sinn Fein last night supported calls for a cross- border independent inquiry into the police probe following the Omagh bomb.

Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said there were serious concerns about the “debacle after debacle” which plagued security force inquiries into the conflict’s bloodiest atrocity.

He was speaking after a service on the 10th anniversary of the 1998 Real IRA car bombing which killed 29 people and unborn twins.

Nobody has been convicted of causing the deaths.

“The calls that are made from the families here for the establishment of an independent tribunal, they obviously have lost all faith in the police investigation and we have seen debacle after debacle,” he said. “I think what we need to do is support the families in the demands that they are now making.”

Families have voiced concern about alleged police failure to act quickly enough on intelligence warnings of the planned bombing.

There have also been a string of flaws in forensics handling of the investigation, highlighted in the trial of Sean Hoey, of South Armagh, who was acquitted of murder at Omagh. The families have secured support from other political parties in their quest for justice.

Mr McGuinness added: “This was a very clear attempt by whoever was behind the bomb to destroy the peace process, destroy Sinn Fein’s peace strategy. Ten years on they have failed miserably.”

During a moving ceremony marking the anniversary, rose petals were scattered on the ground of the busy shopping artery of Market Street where the car bomb devastated so many lives.

A crystal memorial obelisk and a “Garden of Light” with a constellation of 31 mirrors symbolising the light from 31 ended lives were unveiled.

Among the dignitaries were Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Mr McGuinness, the Duchess of Abercorn and some of the families of those dead or injured.

Others stayed away in a row over the wording of a new memorial to the disaster.

Former Lebanon hostage Terry Waite told several thousand onlookers of the difficulty in obtaining justice. “We know that in a flawed and broken world complete justice is hardly ever experienced,” he said.

“We do not live in a world where we can experience absolute justice. With justice, as with so many things in life, we frequently have to settle for something less than the absolute. It is far from easy to recognise that fact.”

The hour-long ceremony began at 3pm with music from the Omagh Waterford peace choir. There followed an extract from the Omagh memorial wording remembering the “cruel evil” that stalked the streets that sunny afternoon.

There were greetings from Buncrana, in the Irish Republic, where three of the dead came from, and from Spain. Some of the children from Buncrana and Madrid had been on a joint day trip to the town.

Paula Helguero Mahon from Madrid represented the Spaniards, along with acting Spanish ambassador to London Javier Carbajosa.

Prayers were said by ministers from the main churches. At 3.10pm there was a minute’s silence and peals of a church bell at the time of the blast, followed by the reading of anti-violence poem, Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto, by John Hewitt.

At the site of the blast there were messages appealing in Irish, Spanish and English for people to remember the dead. They were read by victims’ relatives John McLaughlin, father of 12-year-old Sean, Ana Abad, sister of Rocio Abbad Ramos, and Caroline Martin, sister of Esther Gibson.

US vice-counsel Susan Elliott, nationalist SDLP leader Mark Durkan, Alliance Party leader David Ford, Ulster Unionist Party deputy leader Danny Kennedy and representatives from the Northern Ireland and Irish police forces were present.

A dedication to peace was led by Omagh Anglican church minister the Rev William Seale and Catholic Msgr Joseph Donnelly.

At the site of the bomb there was bagpipe music by Drew McDermott and an Irish uilean pipe refrain by Fiona McMullan while young people from Omagh scattered petals in remembrance.

Before the service, Mr Woodward said: “The events of August 15, 1998 will forever be indelibly marked in the minds and hearts of all decent people.

“From the moment their murder happened, we have wanted to show their families and friends that we were at one with them.”

Mrs McAleese praised the people of Omagh for their remarkable contribution to the consolidation of the Northern Ireland peace process.

Far from fragmenting along familiar dividing lines as they could easily have done, she said people of all persuasions embraced each other as one suffering community.

“In doing so they helped all of us to appreciate in the starkest terms just how precious the opportunity was that had just been given to us to make a new beginning, and how vital it was that we all worked together to turn that opportunity into reality,” Mrs McAleese said.

News Letter
15 August 2008

A MINUTE’S silence has been held in Omagh to mark exactly the moment a Real IRA bomb killed 29 people in the county town a decade ago.

A memorial service was held in Omagh on Friday to mark the 10th anniversary of the bombing which killed 29 people.

Thousands packed the streets of the market town to remember those who died on 15 August 1998.

The plans for the anniversary have been dogged by controversy and the memorial service was boycotted by the families of at least 10 of the victims.

Earlier, Secretary of State Shaun Woodward has praised the “dignity and courage” of the Omagh families ahead of the memorial event, ten years since the atrocity.

Mr Woodward represented the British Government at the commemmorative service.

Speaking ahead of the service, the Secretary of State said: “The events of August 15th 1998 will forever be indelibly marked in the minds and hearts of all decent people. From the moment their murder happened, we have wanted to show their families and friends that we were at one with them.”

“The dignity and courage of the families and friends of those who were murdered has, with the towering response of the people of Omagh, shown the world that terrorism has no place in a decent world,” he added.

Former Lebanon hostage Terry Waite gave an address at the event, which was attended by Stormont Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness and Irish PM Brian Cowen.

Many relatives of the victims are unhappy with the way Omagh District Council has handled the contentious issue of the wording on a series of new memorials at the bomb site in Market street and the nearby Garden of Remembrance.

Families belonging to the Omagh Support and Self Help group have organised an alternative commemoration event, which will take place on Sunday.

Tensions heightened last weekend when it emerged that the leaders of the four main churches in the town had rejected an invite to attend the family organised service.

However, the clergy have since reversed their decision and will now be present at Sunday’s event.

The families who are prepared to attend the council commemoration will be joined by a host of dignitaries for a 45-minute ceremony beside the newly-built memorial garden, which is a short walk from the bomb site.

One decade on, the perpetrators have still not been brought to justice.

This week, Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde admitted it is highly unlikely anyone will be convicted for the bomb attack attributed to the Real IRA.