Fintan and his colour playbook

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What is the purpose of the present Omagh bomb inquiry?

“The Omagh Bombing Inquiry is an independent statutory public inquiry, established by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to investigate whether the bombing in the town of Omagh in August 1998 could reasonably have been prevented by UK state authorities.”

That is a laudable aim, even if it should have happened almost thirty years ago. But recent media reports suggest that it is an opportunity for those who lost loved ones or who were injured in the bomb to tell their story.

And for the mainstream media to report their words or build on them.There’s a fine example of this in today’s Irish Times,  where Fintan O’Toole describes what happened to some victims. His opening sentence is “When Oran Doherty got off the bus in Omagh on the way back to Buncrana, he bought himself a whole cooked chicken”.

This  tells us nothing about the role of UK state authorities in perhaps preventing the mass slaughter. But it does give Fintan, who is a very fine writer, a chance to show how well he can do a ‘colour’ piece, bring alive the story of that day with a series of  cameos of those caught up in the blast.  He ends “But it is all now processed into songs and chants, served up as recreational patriotism, safely distanced in the indifference of ‘that was a long time ago’ or the insouciance of ‘there was no alternative’. We should not need to be hit by this shrapnel of exploded lives to know that it wasn’t and there was.” 

I did say Fintan was a fine writer.

Those who survived the blast probably are happy to tell what happened to them, in that it allows them to  – using a cliché – ‘tell their story’. But that hardly applies to Fintan O’Toole, to whom nothing happened that day. His reasons for writing the article, then? Besides the obvious, that it allows him to exercise his fine writing skills, as the excerpts quoted here exemplify,  Fintan brings an axe to grind in the final few sentences. Which is? That republican violence was never condonable, no matter how long ago  it happened.

Perhaps if Fintan had had a family member gunned down by the British Parachute regiment in Derry on Bloody Sunday, or if he had been one of the eight children of Joan Connolly who was shot in the back and the face and left to die in agony in the Ballymurphy massacre, or if he had been one of the 100+ families whose loved ones were taken from them by the Glenanne gang  – maybe then he might have felt little alternative but to meet lethal force with lethal force. Motivation looks very different from a safe distance.

So I tell you what, Fintan. Use your writing and journalistic skills to do what the Omagh inquiry is supposed to be doing: find out out if the massacre could have been prevented by UK authorities. You might even want to do some probing into the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombs when you’re at it.  The slaughter  of that day surpassed even that visited on Omagh.

But of course to engage in such journalistic probing  would disturb the smugly moral position held by the mainstream media in the South:  the thirty years of bloodshed was all down to those scumbag IRA people.