Reclaim our past to guard our future: Omagh massacre 20 years later

We sometimes have peculiar, evasive attitudes towards our past; sometimes we remember too much, sometimes maybe we don’t remember enough. Sometimes we do both on the same day. Today, the 20th anniversary of the Omagh bombing, may just be such a day.

We remember the barbarism, the fascist contempt, and immorality, the plain, undisguised evil, of the terrorists. But most of all, those of us old enough, remember a market town, one like so many others on this island, one just like the one in which so many of us were born, with its heart torn out.

We remember Omagh almost, but not quite, mute with grief. That Saturday afternoon massacre left 29 people dead and hundreds injured.

That was the physical impact but, as last weekend’s commemorations showed, the emotional and psychological pain endures — as it does for all of the Troubles’ atrocities no matter their scale or origin. How could it not?

That enduring pain may behind our need to forget, to put so many of our past’s horrors in a forget-me-please place.

Processing that carnage hardly leaves room to see beyond the body bags, to round out a response, to round out memories. We may remember the murderers’ styled themselves as “the Real IRA”, a continuum of the Provos, but do we dare follow that line to where it takes us today?

That exercise must recognise the joyous reality that political violence is no longer commonplace. It must recognise that — pre-Brexit — Anglo Irish relations are better than ever. However, it would also recognise the festering Stormont void. That exercise would be appalled by the mutually destructive contempt the Stormont parties show each other.

It would be appalled by Sinn Féin’s holier-than-thou Commons abstentionism, allowing its six deputies to whistle Dixie while Brextremists plot their country’s evisceration.

That the majority in the North voted to remain in the EU has not changed their policy of wait, wait and wait again until one catastrophe or another offers them their Boris Johnson objective — power at any price.

However, but only for people of a certain age, that divine comedy reaches a high point when today’s Sinn Féin leadership lectures a rump of their founder organisation — dissident republicans — about abandoning violence for participatory democracy.

That, from a culture that treated the same arguments — thank you, John Hume — with contempt, is very hard to stomach.

That exercise might conclude with a question that has been asked many times: How did we reach this point? Maybe by surrendering the past to the violent nationalist tradition. At this remove from Omagh, and as we prepare to mark significant centenaries, it’s time for democratic, non-violent Ireland to reclaim its past.

It’s time to challenge extremists who year after year polish the memory of terrorists they describe as “volunteers”.

It’s time we had an annual, national event to remember all of those who died in all of the Omaghs, all of the Dublin/Monaghan bombings to underline that the vast majority of Irish people are unequivocally opposed to violence.

As so many of these events begin to fade from living memory and are again hijacked so they might seduce another generation of young idealists, remembering is not only an act of honouring but one essential to the ongoing security of our democracy.

Let’s call it John Hume Day to honour a great European, one of the greatest Irishmen of our time, but most of all a man who is a brave, unwavering democrat and pacifist.