A Sligo priest, Father Dominick Gillooly, called the perpetrators of the Omagh bombing "satanic pseudo-patriots" and said they must be "taken out of circulation without any pussy-footing or on the lame excuse that the wider republican agenda might be alienated".

"Hollow-sounding" politicians, gardai and RUC were only firefighting as long as the "terrorist thugs" remained at liberty, he said in the Sligo Champion.

The Tyrone Constitution, in a rare editorial, was more measured in its anger. "The people of Omagh and surrounding villages . . . have had to pay an incalculable cost to spur the governments north and south of the Border into promising to do whatever needs to be done to rid the country of the new republican threat emerging in the form of the so-called `Real IRA' which has admitted responsibility for Saturday's bombing."

The paper also said that "the community spirit for which Omagh is noted is being put to its greatest test this week in the aftermath of the terrorist bomb atrocity on Saturday". "The entire area has united in grief around the relatives of the 28 men, women and children who were murdered and in support of the more than 200 people who were wounded, many of whom have lost limbs and face a future both physically and mentally scarred.

"The town, which was working hard to be noticed by prospective industrialists who might set up factories and bring jobs and greater prosperity to its people, has now been given the notoriety it least deserves - propelled to a place at the top of the league of terrorist outrages which have plagued this province for 30 years and which it was hoped were coming to an end with the recent peace agreement."

The Nationalist and Munster Advertiser's headline seemed almost obscene amidst the expressions of grief and outrage which dominated the local newspapers. "Tipp shares Omagh's grief. But dissident group member refuses to condemn blast," it said.

The paper reported that Mr Enda O'Riordan, a Clonmel-based member of the 32-county Sovereignty Movement, the political wing of the RIRA, has rejected a plea from the Minister of State, Mr Noel Davern, for the people involved with the movement in his South Tipperary constituency to reconsider their position.

Another strange headline was the Tipperary Star's "Sinn Fein apologises for `insensitive' disruption". On the Sunday evening following the blast, there was an "appalling" impromptu roadside performance of "rebel songs" by a Northern youth band who stopped at a pub on their way home from a commemorative weekend in Cork. Sinn Fein said it had no links with the band, although it did make an effusive apology.

The band's insensitivity and Mr O'Riordan's obstinacy were black holes in a black week in which many local newspapers wrote about Omagh in a manner so intimate and personal that they could have been covering a local story.

Local newspapers were full of accounts of people who had lost relatives and friends, such as Niall Grimes, systems administrator with Saville Systems in Galway, who lost his mother, sister and niece, reported in the Connacht Tribune.

The close-knit Quirke family of Fenit, Co Kerry, were "devastated" by the blast which has left Chris Quirke, a mother of two, fighting for her life while her 20-year-old daughter, Suzanne, copes with the loss of part of her leg.

The Wicklow People said Marina O'Neill (29), of Arklow, who has lived and worked in Omagh for five years, suffered head injuries and a perforated eardrum, but is recovering; three of her friends are dead.

"In a split second it was a war zone: Navan couple tell of Omagh carnage", said the Meath Chronicle. Damien Sheridan, a former Navan UDC member, and his wife Geraldine, a nurse, were travelling through Omagh in their minibus with their five children and were stopped at a red light only a few car lengths from the centre of the bomb when it went off. With their children screaming, but unhurt, the couple pulled wounded and dying victims into the minivan and brought them to hospital.

"A strange and alien place", "a place of indescribable grief" and a "terrifying evil" were how a Buncrana curate, Father Shane Bradley, described the feelings of the relatives and friends of the three young Buncrana victims, Shaun McLaughlin (12), James Barker (12) and Oran Doherty (8), and of the two Spanish victims, Rocio Abad Ramos (23) and Fernando Blasco (12). The Donegal Democrat said that, speaking at the Requiem Mass, Father Bradley added that "this was a place that no one, absolutely no one should ever have to visit."