Whither the souls of discretion?

Mary Kenny
/ATTENDED A WEDDING on August 15, two years ago. It took place in a pretty part of England, in an (Ad English country church with roses climbing around the church garden. It was an altogether idyllic day. Towards the evening, I got into my car and switched on the mobile phone in case there had been any messages. There certainly had been. There had been a horrific bomb in Omagh and I was to go to Northern Ireland straight away.
The next available flight was the following morning, and I got to Omagh before midday, sharing a car with a colleague. Hire cars were in short supply and so were hotel bedrooms: one Swedish camera crew were reportedly sleeping eight to a room at the main hotel in the town.
Omagh is a small and sleepy town in mid-Ulster and was not really up to coping with the disaster that hit it. That, however, is beside the point. The only important fact was that 29 people had been killed in the terrible bomb that had exploded in the main street on the Saturday afternoon, and hundreds had been injured and maimed.
For the first few days, the basic reaction was just shock. There was a sort of mechanistic continuation of everyday life, but, passing by a local garage, you would suddenly see someone weeping. The wee girls working at the hotels would suddenly dissolve into the helpless tears of the young struck by the cruelty of events.
The churches pulled together, as they have generally done in Omagh, which was never a bitter sectarian town, although there is bitterness in mid-Tyrone, particularly around Dungannon. Benedict Kiely, the writer, who hails from Omagh, has often recalled its tradition as a garrison town in years gone by (as it still is, by the way). To him, this meant that, "every corner boy from Omagh had seen the Taj Mahal".
Catholics and Protestants alike had served in the British army in the past, and had gone overseas, and willy-nilly, this had broadened their outlook. Omagh was the last place you would expect this kind of attack.
The days following were a procession of funerals, requiems, weeping parents, families and friends, flowers and remembrances, Spanish relations arriving to mourn the death of Spanish school children who were among the victims, and then, surprisingly to some, the appearance of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, prominently, among the mourners. David Trimble risked the wrath of some of his own supporters in the Orange Order by attending a funeral Mass, in Bundoran, for two little boys who had died: the first time Mr Trimble had ever done so. It seemed everyone was united in deploring this atrocious attack on human life, on mothers, on the unborn, on young people out shopping on a Saturday afternoon: the softest of soft targets, with no connection whatsoever with military or political agendas.
The politicians vowed that Omagh would not halt the peace process. They also promised that the perpetrators would be apprehended.
But a year on, whoever planted that bomb still walks free. The police investigation – involving both RUC and the Garda – has been assiduous: 500-million telephone calls have been tracked by electronic surveillance, and names handed to the authorities as a result. The police now believe they know the identities of the individuals who devised the attack, those who made the bomb and those who delivered it, but so far, only one man, a publican from Dundalk, has been arrested for conspiracy to cause explosions.
Both parts of Ireland are democracies: the police may believe they know who the suspects are, but that is different from having the kind of evidence sufficient to bring a prosecution.
Moreover, while police work itself has been diligent, there still has not been wholehearted co-operation from nationalist folk in Northern Ireland. And while mainstream Sian Finn condemned the attack on Omagh, they have not given the signal to their followers to co-operate with the RUC. So, for all the weeping and pain, there is still that little bit of reluctance to "inform". The role of the Church, it seems to me, should be to worry about the state of men's souls: and you wonder about the souls of those individuals who carried out that act. Is there any remorse for the dreadfulness of the deed? Is there any repining for the lives, mostly young lives, they took away without warning? Is there any priest or preacher, anywhere in the country, who could reach into the depths of those souls, and say: "For Christ's sake, repent of what you have done"? All the money in the world, which has poured into Omagh, will not heal as one single act of contrition from those responsible for death on the Day of the Assumption.
PRESIDENT Bill Clinton leaves office on a note of triumph. For all his flaws, he has immense people appeal (and, of course, he presided over ever-expanding prosperity). Indeed, his flaws, and his sins, which he is now given to confessing openly – and frequently – before thousands of clerics, have become, almost, the sign of his humanity, and the acknowledged fallen state of a man still struggling to do his best.