Omagh victim’s mother asks “What might have been?”


Memorial services will take place in Omagh and Buncrana today to mark 20 years since the Omagh bombing.
29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, were killed when a massive car bomb ripped through the town centre on the 15th of August 1998.
Over 200 others were injured in the Real IRA attack – however no one has ever been convicted.
Patricia Mc Laughlin’s son Shaun was one of three Buncrana schoolboys killed in the bombing, along with two members of a Spanish exchange group who had been staying in Inishowen.
She says she’s plagued with questions about what might have been…………..

The Bishop of Derry says the memorial to those killed in Omagh is a monument to all the innocent who were torn away from community through violence.
Preaching in the town last night, he said the bomb that killed young and old also scarred so many others in body and in mind.
In his homily at Sacred Heart Church in Omagh last night, Bishop Donal McKeown said something changed forever in Omagh on August 15th, 1998, and people continue to limp through life because of the brutal actions of others.
However, he urged the people of Omagh not to underestimate what they have done, saying the community has found ways of remembering their loved ones in a quiet and dignified way.
He added Omagh’s way of remembering and honouring points to the fact that, in every conflict, it is mostly innocent civilians, and not combatants who do the dying.
Bishop McKeown concluded that while some causes may be worth dying for, no cause is worth killing for. Any story we try to tell about our conflicts has to weep for the past, he said, and never glorify any of it.

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