'The longest and hardest night': Omagh bomb, 25 years on

Lisa Doherty can still see the four sweets.

Her brother Oran, 11 years her junior at just eight years old, was a bad traveller.

On the morning of August 15, 1998, Oran Doherty and some of his friends from Buncrana went on a trip to the Ulster American Folk Park with a group of Spanish exchange students.

The itinerary included a shopping trip to Omagh.

Lisa had just returned from a brief holiday in Salou. Among the presents she brought home to Knockalla Drive was a leather chain, from which hung a metal Nike tag.

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She woke that Saturday morning to Oran rummaging in the room.

‘C’mere, how many did you take?’

‘Four sweets, Lisa. Two for going and two for coming back.’

“They were rock hard sweets I brought back from Spain,” Lisa Dillon now recalls.

Lisa was on Buncrana main street, cradling her little son Keelan, who was just a few months old and had just had his first haircut.

Someone approached her in a panic: ’Did you hear there was a bomb in Omagh?’

Armed with knowledge of the plan, Lisa’s initial response was calm.

‘They’re in the Folk Park, they’re okay’.

“You just get a feeling sometimes,” she says, 25 years after a 500lb car bomb exploded on Market Street in Omagh at 3.04pm, killing 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins.

Soon after, some of the Doherty family got a call to say Oran was okay and was on a bus home.

At 9pm, the door of a bus opened in Buncrana. One by one, they disembarked, ashen-faced and teary.

Oran Doherty didn’t step off the bus.

“That feeling in the stomach just hits you,” Lisa says. “It was the longest and hardest night. People were panicking, but just waiting and waiting for a phone call. There were hospitals and community centres in Omagh treating hundreds of people. There were names being put up on boards to keep people informed. There were calls every now and again, but there was just nothing. No-one slept and as the night went by, you just knew . . .”

Stanley McCombe and his eldest son, Clive, had just got off the stage at the World Pipe Band Championships at Glasgow Green. The pair were competing with the Mountfield Pipe Band.

His wife Ann worked at Watterson's Clothes Shop and went to work that morning as normal. She was on a tea break at 3pm.

At around 3.20pm in the afternoon, news of the explosion reached Glasgow.

The next few hours are a blur.

“We were just helpless,” Stanley says now. “Even if we had been there, we couldn’t have done anything. I just knew it wasn’t good. People were doing their best to find out for us what had happened and trying their best to find out news of Ann.

“You didn’t want to believe what was happening, but I knew if Ann was missing that something was badly wrong.”

At 11pm Rev Ian Myers identified the body of Ann McCombe, who originally hailed from Ballindrait. Her father worked in the Swilly Valley Mills.

Stanley returned to Omagh the following morning at 9am. He was escorted to an army base, where a makeshift morgue was set up, in order to identify the remains of his beloved wife, with whom he had just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary just weeks beforehand.

“Ann’s coffin could never have been opened,” he says. “My sons never saw their mother in the coffin. I can still see it to this day.”

While the coach load of pipe band members were solemnly making their way back to Omagh, the sound of silence haunted Knockalla Drive in Buncrana. Lisa Dillon remembers it as being ‘so silent, so eerie’.

A phone call punctured the silence.

The McLaughlin family had just learned of the death of Shaun (12). The Dohertys had attempted to keep Bernie, their mother, distracted from realising what was obvious just four doors away.

She knew.

Bernie Doherty answered the phone to her husband: ‘Mickey, wee Shaun is dead’.

At the other end of the line, Mickey Doherty’s words were almost spoken in slow motion: ‘And so is our wee Oran’.

“There was just hysteric screaming, it was crazy,” Lisa Dillon recalls.

They, too, had to travel to the temporary morgue. Oran Doherty died alongside Shaun McLaughlin and James Barker (12), who also lived in Buncrana.

“The three wee bodies were just there, side-by-side,” Lisa says. “Oran was just like a wee boy asleep.”

Veteran photographer Joe Boland (whose images accompany this piece) covered many of the darkest days of the ‘Troubles’ for a range of media outlets.

He was working for the Omagh-based Ulster Herald in August 1998. He was in Letterkenny when the editor, Paddy Cullen, called him within minutes of the explosion.

The sheer scale of it was obvious when, while making his way to Omagh, he called a colleague. The voice on the other end of the line shook: ‘It’s bad. It’s bad.’

Yet, nothing could prepare for the sights and sounds of Omagh.

“The whole area was just rubble,” he says.  “It was horrendous. I went into autopilot and just started snapping. In those days, you couldn’t see the photos until you developed them in the ‘dark room’. You didn’t know what you had and you just had to go through the process of poring over them all.”

He had seen bomb sites before. Omagh was different.

Even the words now appear as haunting as the photos must’ve as they appeared in a darkened room in the Ulster Herald’s base on nearby John Street: “Feet, shoes, buggies.”

Tyrone County Hospital became overwhelmed as people searched frantically for something. Anything.

Dr Dominic Pinto, the senior surgeon at the hospital on the day of the bomb, described it as being ‘like a battlefield’.

“It was horrendous,” Boland says. “People were just screaming, almost squealing, shouting for family members. The squealing inside the hospital was horrific; people were just crying for help.”

On the Monday evening, the bodies of Oran Doherty, Shaun McLaughlin and James Barker came back to Buncrana.

Twelve-year-old Fernando Blasco Baselga and Rocio Abad Ramos (23) were part of the group from Spain on an exchange programme in Buncrana. They, too, lost their lives.

Rocio was on her fifth visit to Ireland whole Fernando’s father had been wounded in a Basque bomb in Spain just six years previously. There were 13 Spanish students wounded in the blast,

In Spain, Sky News relayed the first, horrifying scenes from a County Tyrone town, beamed now across the world.

As a cortège returned to Buncrana, hundreds of people straddled the roadsides, an August evening lit by the flickers from the wax sticks held by those with their heads bowed.

“Every single person, in all parts we were through, stood out to show how much it hurt everyone,” Lisa says. “I’ll never forget when we came to the roundabout into Buncrana and all the people there; there must’ve been hundreds at the West End. Hundreds of people just in silence.

“I remember the darkness, just darkness, when the hearses pulled up and the coffins were taken into the houses.”

Mickey Doherty was quoted as having remarked that evening: “I would give anything to see his little feet walk up the road now’.

At the nearby St Mary’s Church, a group of Spanish students huddled together around a Spanish-English dictionary. Someone asked what they were up to. The group was seeking a Spanish translation for the word ‘evil’.

On August 19, 1998, as they had been so often, Oran Doherty, Shaun McLaughlin and James Barker were side-by-side again

Three wooden coffins sat hauntingly at the altar at St Mary’s Church, Oran Doherty’s draped in a Celtic flag.

Celtic player and Denmark international Marc Rieper carried his remains from the church. Hundreds packed inside with hundreds more outside.

The then President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, was among the mourners.

A little more than two months earlier, President McAleese was presented with a poem, ‘The Bridge’. by Scoil Íosagáin pupil Shaun McLaughlin.

“Orange and Green - it doesn’t matter

United now

Don’t shatter our dream

Scatter the seeds of peace over our land

So we can travel

Hand in hand across the bridge of hope”

At the funerals, Fr Shane Bradley, then a curate in Buncrana, described the town as ‘a strange and alien place of indescribable grief’.

Two others from Buncrana, Emmet McLaughlin (8) and Ronan McGrory (13) underwent surgery and survived the explosion.

On the tenth anniversary of the bombing, Ronan, whose mother, Margo, was on a retreat at Mount Melleray and got a taxi home from Waterford, recalled: "When it went off I was knocked to the ground and was unconscious. Then I woke up, I was told later that had I not woken up then I would have been dead within half an hour.

"I woke up shouting for help and some police man lifted me and put me in the back of his car and took me to hospital.

"I remember thinking it was night time and I had been laying on the ground for so long, but that was just because there was so much smoke.”

The Ulster Herald chronicled all the funerals, the copy illustrated by Boland’s stark images.

“Scale wise, nothing was close to it,” he says. “There was just rubble everywhere. That Saturday, people were just digging and scraping away. The Creeslough explosion was as close to a reminder of Omagh as I have seen. In terms of scale, Omagh was the worst of all.

“The Sunday, the following day, was almost worse. Just the silence of the place. No-one was speaking.”

Stanley McCombe has spent the best part of the last 25 years campaigning for justice. For answers. For closure. For truth. 

His sister, Rosemary, was badly injured and the effects of the blast remain with the family.

“My sister has had to have two hip replacements and a knee replacements - she has a body full of shrapnel and can never have an MRI scan,” he says. “That is difficult in its own right. Our family’s life was turned upside down. This is with you ever day. You know, it never leaves you. There is always something that brings it back.”

Michael Gallagher, who has close family in the St Johnston-Carrigans area, has been another sterling campaigner. His son Aiden, a just-qualified mechanic, was killed in the explosion at the age of 21.

A public inquiry into the atrocity is now imminent with Lord Alan Turnbull having been recently appointed as the chair.

“A normal death, you can accept,” Mr McCombe says. “But not the brutal murder of so many people. These people were in the prime of their lives and then, literally, bang.

"Some deaths and illnesses are acceptable, but you cannot ever accept callous murder. Twenty five years ago, I made a promise to Ann in her coffin that I would fight to the bitter end for the truth and for justice for how my beloved wife left us.”

Oran Doherty’s backpack was recovered from the scene. Inside were a packet of brandy balls and two sticks of honeycomb he bought as presents for his family. They were brought to the altar as gifts on the day of the funeral and have been retained as precious keepsakes.

Lisa Dillon still has the Nike chain. 

“It is never going to go away and it’s something we live with every day,” she says.

“Maybe we will get some form of closure, but it did happen. Oran is gone.”