The Omagh bombers were "off the Richter scale of decency," the President, Mrs McAleese, said during a visit to the town yesterday. As she arrived for a meeting with the relatives of the dead and injured, the President said she had come to Omagh "to show how much I care and to show compassion for people whose lives have been so devastated by this act of the most extraordinary brutality that has ever been visited on the people of this island".
Earlier on RTE Radio, the President said there was a "posse of serial killers" loose on the island. In her initial response to the Omagh bombing, she also said that the message of those who had carried it out was one of "utterly cold, calculated hatred".
In Omagh, the President spent about 40 minutes talking to the families and friends at the town's leisure centre. Her arrival there coincided with that of the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, and the party's chief negotiator, Mr Martin McGuinness. However, although both men were among those waiting for her when she entered the building, she did not stop to speak to them. Surrounded by RUC minders and officials, Mrs McAleese skirted the Sinn Fein leader on a number of occasions but there was no apparent contact.
The President had earlier visited the site of Saturday's atrocity, and spoke of seeing "shoes on the pavement", and "bags of shopping that will never see home".
"It was a most tragic scene. You could only be impressed by the fact that whoever planted the bomb yesterday in that maze of streets had to have walked through children and mammies and daddies to get away and they could only have seen people going about the humblest of chores.".
If the bombers were "capable of what they accomplished yesterday", she said, "its important for all of us to understand that they are capable of anything". There were no moral standards to measure these people by, she added, "they're off the scale, off the Richter scale of decency".
There was no knowing what they might be planning next: "All I know is that they have to be stopped." There were people who knew them, and the way to stop them striking again was for these people to pass on what they knew to the police.
She also praised the work of police at the bomb scene. She had spoken to one officer who spent all Saturday evening "ferrying people to hospital in anything that moved" and had been back again yesterday "working away calmly".
The Omagh bomb was ["]designed to shatter the fragile consensus["] the President said after visiting the injured at the Tyrone County Hospital in Omagh yesterday.
But the people she had met were determined "the bullies will not get their way," she said. "If they could plan evil of the magnitude they unleashed on this harmless lovely community yesterday what else could they plan?"
Mrs McAleese called on ordinary people to help defeat the bombers. "The Garda authorities and the RUC can do so much. But the policy has to be a partnership."
Mrs McAleese said she had met a Protestant man in the hospital with his young son. He said his Catholic neighbour had asked him yesterday morning "gosh you must hate us". "He said `absolutely not', because that was what this was designed to do," she said.
At the end of her interview with journalists on the steps of the Tyrone County Hospital she was asked how she felt in the last two days, and after what she had seen. "It brings back so many memories," she said.
In her interview on RTE's The Sunday Show she said that those looking very soberly at events on the island always knew there would be a small group of people who would never come on board.
"But I think in our worst moments we never thought them capable of this kind of carnage. And now that we know they are, I think we would want to take a really long, hard look at the kind of people we are dealing with now.".
Later, she added: "One of the things that concerns me is perhaps some of the responses to these people. I have been hearing people say that perhaps now, given the awful scale of this, these people themselves will look in horror at what they have accomplished. I wonder will they, because I think we are dealing now . . . There has been a huge debate within the republican movement and indeed Sinn Fein brought the IRA to the point of the ceasefire for which all of us were very, very grateful. . .
"Clearly we are dealing here with people who have been immune to that debate." ". . .I think we have, unfortunately, a posse of what you might describe as serial killers on the loose on this island, and I was very comforted to hear both governments absolutely adamant that these people will be hunted down and that they will be brought to justice as quickly and as expeditiously as possible".
Asked what should be done with the bombers the President said it was not a matter on which she should comment, "except to say that I think the public will want, and are entitled to and are getting, I think, very strong reassurance from the Government, and from the police, north and south, that everything that can be done is being done and will continue to be done to ensure that they are brought to justice".
What had kept coming back to her, she said, in a very real way during the night was a memory of the day her father's business was car-bombed.
"In that a young woman died, a mother of three young children, one deaf. Shortly after my inauguration, I received a letter from her parents telling me and this happened 25 years ago how unhealed, how raw the wounds were yet."