On September 3, 1998, near the scene of the explosion, United States President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair unveil a plaque in memory of the twenty-eight Omagh bombing victims. Crowds of thousands waited hours to catch a glimpse of the president.
Following the unveiling, they walk through the town’s main street, Market Street, which bore the brunt of the explosion. Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton, who earlier placed a wreath at the newly-unveiled plaque, Blair and his wife Cherie meet and shake hands with many of the crowd, who are clearly pleased to see them. They also visit Watterson’s drapers shop, where three members of staff had been killed, and lay a wreath.
Earlier, in the town’s leisure centre, they meet the victims of the Omagh bombing, and the family and friends of those who died. Blair and Clinton spend about an hour talking to people in Omagh. They meet some of the people who had been injured in the blast, including a group who have been released from hospital for the day especially to meet the president. Una McGurk is discharged from the Altnagelvin Area Hospital in Derry, and sisters Laura and Nicola Hamilton from the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald, on the outskirts of east Belfast. Thirty-four people remain in hospital, three – two women and a man – in critical conditions.
Downing Street later says the Blairs and Clintons were “deeply moved” by their meeting in the gymnasium. The prime minister’s official spokesman says Blair found the courage and determination of the people he met “positively inspirational.”
The first person Clinton speaks to is a young girl who has both eyes covered with bandages. He also meets a boy wearing a Leeds United F.C. shirt who is unable to shake the president’s hand because both his hands are still bandaged.
Before arriving in Omagh, Clinton puts the issue of decommissioning at the top of his priorities for change in Northern Ireland. He says these priorities are “To decommission weapons of war that are obsolete in a Northern Ireland at peace, to move forward with a formation of an executive council, adapt your police force so it has the confidence, respect and support of all the people, to end street justice, because defining crime, applying punishment and enforcing the law, must be left to the peoples’ elected representatives, the courts and the police, and to pursue early release for prisoners whose organisations have truly abandoned violence and to help them find a productive, constructive place in society.”
(From: “Clinton consoles bomb victims,” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk, September 4, 1998)
seamus dubhghaill 