During the Northern Irish conflict there were attacks on pubs, fish and chip shops, cemeteries, police stations and army barracks, at night and in broad daylight, bombings and executions, committed by republicans and unionists, and even by security forces of the State. But none so cruel, so indiscriminate and so unfair as that of Omagh, a quarter of a century ago tomorrow.
Life is being in the right place at the right time, or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fate, luck or whatever you want to call it. This is what happened to the 29 fatalities (there were another 220 injured) from the Omagh bomb, which made no distinction whatsoever by nationality or religion. Protestants and Catholics, men and women, a mother pregnant with twins, adults and adolescents, a teacher (Rocío Abad) and a twelve-year-old Spanish boy (Fernando Blasco) who was taking an English course in Ireland died equally. It was the only attack in the entire history of Ulster with foreign victims.
The Good Friday peace accords had been signed thirteen weeks earlier, but dissident republican groups opposed the ceasefire and arms handover, including the so-called Real IRA (Real IRA), a splinter of the Provisional IRA, whose political wing , Sinn Fein, has been the most voted party in the last elections of both Ulster and the Republic, and is one step away from reaching power in Belfast and Dublin.
In this historical context, the terrorists stole a Vauxhall car on August 13 (a Thursday) in the Republic, changed its license plate to one from Ulster, and loaded it with 250 kilos of explosives, and two days later they traveled to Omagh with the intention of leaving it in front of the court building, and notify the authorities from a telephone booth so that they deactivate the bomb.
But the driver couldn’t find parking where he had planned, and had to leave the infernal machinery, with the countdown running, at one end of Market Street, the main shopping street, some three hundred yards away. The terrorist group made three calls, one of them to Ulster television, reporting that a bomb was going to explode, with the code “Martha Pope”, the same one that had been used two weeks earlier to warn of another attack. But he couldn’t quite explain the location of the vehicle, and the police inadvertently sent people to where it was going to explode instead of in the other direction.
At 3:09 p.m. on Saturday the massacre took place. A crash, a ball of fire, and a barrage of metal, brick, and glass. Pipes burst, and the water literally turned into rivers of blood. Arms and legs of dismembered bodies appeared on Market Street, and 28 people who were in the impact zone (including the mother pregnant with twins) lost their lives. The injured were taken to hospitals in Coleraine, Derry and Belfast. Some have still not recovered from the trauma.
There are stories that a journalist would never want to cover, and this is one of them. A few days after the attack, John and Mary Gallagher, parents of three children, received La Vanguardia at their modest home in Buncrana, a coastal town in County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland. It was the family where twelve-year-old Fernando Blasco stayed that summer, as his older brother Guillermo had done for four courses. They couldn’t hold back their tears when they said that they didn’t want to go on the tragic excursion to a funfair in Ulster, stopping at lunchtime in Omagh to do some shopping. The wrong place at the wrong time. He preferred going to a Gaelic football match.
Fernando had his small room decorated with empty cigarette packs painted as if they were soccer team shirts, and the night before he had been arguing at dinner (at 6:30 p.m.) with one of the Gallagher sons about whether Real Madrid or Manchester United were better. At 8.45 he went to bed for the last time in his life. In the morning he fell asleep, hurriedly ate a bowl of cereal with milk and orange juice for breakfast, and in order not to miss the bus (his sister Lucrecia was on it, who lived with another family and was injured in the attack) he used a short cut through the beach and the fields. In bad time he arrived in time to catch him.
If he hadn’t, Fernando would surely be a 37-year-old grown man today. He went to the Virgen del Recuerdo Jesuit school and that was his second summer with the Gallaghers, who adored him and nicknamed him Speedy González because of the speed with which he devoured his food, going up and down the steps two at a time. He already spoke English very well, and after school, or on weekends, he spent hours swimming at Buncrana beach, water skiing, boating, pony riding and playing football.
The real IRA claimed responsibility for the attack but claimed that it was a mistake, that the bomb should not have gone off. Shortly after, another group of republican dissidents, the INLA (Irish National Libration Army) joined the ceasefire. No one has ever been convicted of the event, the greatest atrocity of the Troubles. The leader of the gang, Michael McKevitt (who died two years ago), and three other people were found responsible in a civil lawsuit and forced to pay almost two million euros in compensation, but so far the victims have not received a penny. .
Over time it has been revealed that British intelligence services were infiltrated with the Real IRA, and were aware that it was preparing a coup that day in Omagh. Over time peace was consolidated in Ulster, and now only low intensity terrorism remains. But for Fernando and the other 28 dead, time ran out that Saturday, twenty-five years ago now.
