ORAN DOHERTY should have received his Leaving Certificate results on Wednesday. Mary Grimes should have celebrated her 76th birthday with her grandchildren today. Breda Devine, who would be nearly 12 now, should be thinking about starting her last year in primary school.
Fernando Blasco Baselga should be graduating from university in Madrid. Esther Gibson, who was due to be married, should be mothering the children she dreamed of. The twins that Avril Monaghan was expecting should be looking forward to their joint tenth birthday party in October, along with their big sister, Maura. The grief felt by the families of all the 29 people murdered by the Real IRA in Omagh 10 years ago is not just for what was, but for what might have been, for the future that was so cruelly, stupidly and pointlessly stolen from the victims.
Ten years on, we inhabit that future. We should not forget Omagh, its victims or its perpetrators. Neither should we forget the way we felt in the aftermath of the atrocity. It is well to remember the horror, the sorrow, the anger that, in the bitterest of ironies, succeeded in creating a united Ireland - Protestant and Catholic, North and South, united in a wave of revulsion. Differences of religion, politics or nationality counted for nothing that day. The dead were Protestant, Catholic and Mormon, from the North, the Republic and Spain but all that mattered was that they were mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. In the tears shed for them, there was a recognition that humanity must never be an abstraction to be sacrificed for any cause.
There was also a darker, more disturbing sense of recognition. At the funerals of Avril Monaghan, her daughter and her unborn twins, Bishop Joseph Duffy said that "we must all of us again honestly face the perverse insanity and deep-seated and deep-rooted nature of the evil that has caused all this suffering". He was right to identify the deep roots of the atrocity. It was not a one-off act of madness, but a repetition, albeit on a larger scale, of McGurk's bar, of Claudy, of Dublin and Monaghan, of Enniskillen, of Shankill Road.
Like those and all the other atrocities of the Troubles, Omagh was the physical manifestation of sectarianism and tribalism, of self-righteous zealotry and the soft ambivalence of otherwise respectable people who condemned murder in one cause and made excuses for it in another.
The revulsion that followed Omagh had within it an element of shame. Why did it take the obscenity of Omagh to create a genuine, shared sense that such vile deeds are utterly beyond the Pale? And given the effect that the reaction to Omagh had on terrorism in Ireland, what might have happened had we reacted earlier?
It should not take the terrible spectacle of an Omagh bombing to show a civilised society the ultimate cost of division, intolerance, and a "sneaking regard" for violence. Twenty nine people should not have had to lose their lives to show us the meaning of barbarism. But since they did, we should never forget them nor the dark truths their deaths exposed.