It is hard to imagine anything worse than the Real IRA’s bombing of the market town of Omagh on 15 August 1998. It was the deadliest single atrocity of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The 29 people who were slaughtered that day included toddlers, primary school kids, teenage girls volunteering in the Oxfam shop and a young woman who was pregnant with twins.
Yet for those left behind, and for the 220 people injured that day, there was in fact one thing worse: the tormenting thought that it could all have been prevented. The bereaved and the survivors have had to live with the haunting possibility that the police and the intelligence services could have saved them from this unspeakable calamity. Only now, with the announcement by the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, of an independent inquiry into what the security services knew in advance of the attack, can they hope to lay those ghosts to rest.
