The ancient power of one priest’s plea to cowards

WHAT a brave bunch of rebels they were, the men who bombed Omagh 20 years ago this week. What a credit to the cause of Irish liberty, what worthy successors to the men of 1916, what an inspiration to freedom fighters everywhere – the likes of Radovan Karadzic and Bashar al Assad must look to them in awe and admiration.

How much courage must it have taken to plant a bomb in the middle of a busy street on a Saturday afternoon in late summer and then run away?

What ingenious timing, so perfect for the slaughter of families shopping for schoolbooks and uniforms, tourists enjoying a languid afternoon in a scenic town, locals going about their weekend errands.

How incredibly fearless, to make sure they were at a safe distance when the bomb went off, blowing women and children to kingdom come.

What a fantastic success for the struggle, to have included two unborn babies and a toddler, two teenagers, an eight-year-old and three 12-year-old boys among the dead.

And how clever to have scurried off, hidden away and denied all involvement for 20 years, unlike Pearse and Connolly who held up their hands and claimed their action.

What ballads we would sing in their honour, what medals we’d strike, what tributes we would pen, if only we knew their names – self-effacing heroes to a fault.

Almost ten years ago, four men were found liable, by a civil court, for the massacre. Michael McKevitt, the ‘Real IRA’ leader, Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy and Séamus Daly all had terrorrelated convictions when they were held to have been behind the Omagh bombing, and were ordered to pay €1.8million to relatives of the victims.

Even though it has been claimed they own more than enough to cover the bill, between them, the four have refused to pay up, and continue to deny any role in that heroic triumph for their cause.

But surely, after all these years, the time for modesty is past, and whoever planned and masterminded this astonishing ‘spectacular’ should be proud to take the credit?

If you didn’t know better, you’d imagine there was something shameful in having taken 29 defenceless lives, including a woman pregnant with twins, with a hidden bomb on a shopping street, something diabolical and evil in murdering babies and children in the stealthiest fashion. If McKevitt, Campbell, Murphy and Daly didn’t bomb Omagh then, given their proven connections to the movement behind the bombing, perhaps they might be able to tell us who did, so that we can remember them in a fitting fashion. At a memorial ceremony in the Co. Tyrone town this week, the priest who tended to the dead and dying that day in 1998 invited those brave heroes of the struggle to make themselves known.

‘Come you who 20 years ago did this to Omagh,’ said Fr Kevin Mullan, ‘please come back among us to this market place, which you tore up with your bomb, to this street and its shops where you left our relatives, friends and visitors broken, bleeding and dead.

‘You were not afraid then,’ he went on. ‘Do not be afraid now.’

In a week when his Church has taken another battering, with shameful revelations emerging from the US and criticism of the Pope’s role in child protection threatening to blight his impending visit here, Fr Mullan’s lyric plea had a chilling, ancient power. It almost had the ring of an exorcism, of a priest calling upon a demon to show itself, taunting it with its cowardice in the face of good.

HE was wasting his time, of course. The men who bombed Omagh aren’t cowards, just modest heroes. They’re not demons, they’re giants. Of course they weren’t afraid when they planted that bomb because, unlike the unsuspecting families and tourists and locals who passed them as they walked away and left it there, those men had nothing to fear.

And it isn’t fear that is preventing them from coming forward and claiming their deed now, perish the thought. It’s just humility. These are brave men, the rebels who slaughtered unarmed civilians on a quiet street 20 years ago, and then ran away.

They’re not cringeing, lying, skulking cowards, passing the buck and shirking the blame. It’s not that they’re too weak or fearful or contemptible to face those people whose loved ones they sneakily maimed and dismembered, two decades ago. It’s not that they’re too craven and yellow to take up Fr Mullan’s fierce challenge, to return to the town and admit what they did, or that they’ll go to their troubled deathbeds with the blood of all those innocents staining their souls.

It’s just that they’re far too modest for their own good.