Omagh Bombing

One of the deadliest single bombings during the 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland, the 1998 bombing in the village of Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, killed 29 people and seriously threatened the peace process.

From the late 1960s until 1998, Northern Ireland was the scene of a civil conflict between [Page 445]members of its majority-Protestant community, who wished Northern Ireland to remain a part of Great Britain, and its minority-Catholic community, who wished the province to become a part of the Republic of Ireland. Late in 1997, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and various Protestant paramilitary groups declared a cease-fire. On April 10, 1998, delegates representing the major parties to the conflict signed the Good Friday Accords, a document laying out the necessary steps to peace and the order in which they should be taken.

A number of IRA members disagreed with the decision to declare a cease-fire, and they were disgusted by the Good Friday Accords, which required the IRA to seek a political solution to the conflict through its representative political party, Sinn Féin. These members split with the group and formed a competing organization, the Real IRA.

On August 15, 1998, members of the Real IRA are believed to have driven from the Republic of Ireland across the border to Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Omagh, a small town with a largely Catholic population, had long housed a British Army garrison. Sometime early that morning, a 500-pound car bomb was parked in the town's market square, an area sure to be crowded with shoppers, as that Saturday was the final day of an annual town festival.

Around 2:30 p.m. a call was placed to Omagh's police force warning them of a bomb. The police believed it was near the town's courthouse, a building at the opposite end of the main street from the market square. Police rushed to clear the area, tragically directing people toward the market. Shortly after 3:00 p.m., the car bomb exploded, utterly destroying two buildings nearby. More than 200 people were injured, and 29 were killed, with one victim dying several months later of his injuries. The dead included nine children and three generations of one family.

The attack was the most deadly single bombing in Northern Ireland, and it immediately put the peace accords into jeopardy. Although suspicion quickly fell on the Real IRA, many Unionist politicians declared that the IRA's failure to disarm—its reluctance to do so had been a major obstacle throughout the peace process—had allowed the atrocity. Providing some reassurance about the IRA's commitment to the peace process, Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, made an unprecedented declaration condemning the bombings. Previously, the IRA's position was that civilian deaths were regrettable but justified. In the days following the bombing, the British Parliament passed harsh new anti-terror laws that allowed suspects to be convicted on the word of a senior police officer, and the Real IRA issued an apology for the bombing, insisting that civilians had not been the target.

In December 2001, Nuala O'Loan, the ombudsman for Northern Ireland's new security force, issued a report severely criticizing the conduct of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), in particular the officers of its Special Branch, in the days before the bombing. The report maintains that a highly regarded police informant warned his Special Branch handlers that a bombing was being planned somewhere in Northern Ireland for August 15. It further alleges that a warning was received by the RUC that a mortar attack on police headquarters in Omagh was also planned for that date. The report implies that if these two pieces of information had been given to local police, the tragedy might have been averted.

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