'Regret, shame, sorrow. It was wrong. End of story." This is what Sinn Féin councillor Brian McCaffrey has to say about the bomb.
He admits he is extremely uncomfortable talking about it, and insists, against all the evidence, that the IRA did not deliberately set out to kill Protestant civilians.
"Republicans have never accepted that," he says. "It would have been political suicide as well as the carnage. Sinn Féin was sowing the seeds of what would become the peace process. This was a huge setback."
The IRA lied at first, claiming the British army had set off the bomb. It took eight years for it to admit this was nonsense. It has persisted in claiming that the bomb was intended to go off earlier, when police and soldiers were searching the area. No explanation is offered as to why, in that case, when the bomb had not yet exploded, and the people were gathering for the ceremony, it did not belatedly give a warning.
"The timer was set wrong," McCaffrey insists, still.
Bobby Sands had been the local MP, then Owen Carron. Sinn Féin held eight seats in Fermanagh District Council in 1987. Half of them were lost at the next election. The strategy outlined in 1981 by Danny Morrison was in crisis. The armalite was proving fatal to the ballot box. Gerry Adams began to distance Sinn Féin from the IRA, and to urge its volunteers to be "careful and careful again".
However, the IRA in the border counties next to Fermanagh continued to target Protestant civilians, including 21-year-old Gillian Johnston in Belleek just months after the bomb and, a few months later, William Hassard and Frederick Love, who had done maintenance work on the RUC station in the same village. The IRA would later erect a monument to two of its dead volunteers on the spot where the two men were shot.
Brian McCaffrey says the then Sinn Féin chairman of the council was under constant attack after the bomb.
"He is a pioneer and there were even those who suggested he had no right to wear his pioneer pin," he says. "We took such a pounding after Enniskillen that it actually galvanised the movement. Gordon Wilson was a lone voice standing out."
S McK