By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
One warm summer day in 2011, I visited two old stone churches that stand adjacent on a hill in Omagh, Northern Ireland. For many years these churches, one Catholic and one Protestant, seemed much more distant from each other than the few steps it actually takes to walk from one to the other. This distance decreased during the span of my lifetime, perhaps most visibly because twenty years ago, a car bomb ripped through the small town, killing and injuring members of both congregations.
On the afternoon of August 15, 1998, two men parked a stolen car loaded with explosives in Omagh’s central business district, on Market Street near the Dublin Road intersection. The men belonged to the Real Irish Republican Army, a splinter group opposed to the IRA’s ceasefire and the Good Friday peace agreement signed a few months before. They set the bomb’s delayed detonation timer and fled. The bomb exploded at 3:10 pm, launching shrapnel in all directions, and creating a fireball and shockwave.
The blast devastated the busy shopping area and blew out the front glass windows of nearby Slevins Chemist shop, a pharmacy owned by our friends. News reports described a scene of “utter carnage” with “the dead and dying strewn across the street.” The explosion ended 31 lives, including of a young woman pregnant with twins. Hundreds more were injured and/or maimed. Bombs do not respect religious labels, but ironically about half of the dead were Catholics and half Protestants.
Our friend Patrick Slevin, a local businessman, told me the massive loss on both sides of the religious divide brought the townsfolk closer together after the vicious attack. The Catholic and Protestant communities condemned the terrorist act. People from both churches, and other local congregations and community groups, banded together to comfort the grieving, tend to the injured, bury the dead, rebuild the rubble, and seek to hold the bombers responsible for their crimes.
When my family and I travelled to Omagh in 2011, we saw the bomb site, the memorial, and both lovely churches on the hill. We visited after participating in the Utah Ulster Project, an international grass roots peace initiative that brings Catholic and Protestant teens to the United States. The Northern Irish teens are hosted by American teens and families. Through a month-long program of service projects, fun, personal discoveries, and shared interdenominational worship, they all get to know each other as individual people rather than by labels such as religion. All involved leave with a better understanding of their differences and, most importantly, their commonality.
During our Omagh trip, I asked to visit the churches our local friends attended. The Slevin family (we hosted daughter Caroline) took us to morning mass at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Our Protestant friends the Mitchells (we hosted daughter Amy) gave us a tour of St. Columba’s Anglican Church. (We later hosted a fine young Protestant man named Jack Stevenson too, but never got to visit his church with him.) Sacred Heart Church, dedicated in 1899, overlooks the Strule River as it meanders through the picturesque town. The Church, a striking example of late Victorian architecture, has a 200 foot spire that provides a panoramic view of the green countryside of surrounding County Tyrone. St. Columba’s Parish Church, just across the street, was dedicated in 1871 and built on the site of the first Church of Ireland chapel in Omagh. It has huge windows and a massive interior, but I was touched most by its many memorials to those killed in what the Northern Irish call “The Troubles.”
Both churches are peaceful, quiet places that please the eye and refresh the spirit. The best part about visiting them, however, was the people who took us there. Our friends are living and breathing survivors of Northern Ireland’s long history of suffering and strife. Our friends also embody Northern Ireland’s resilience, and its brave commitment to love and harmony, which not only sustained Omagh during the dark days following the bombing, but also helped create the most peaceful twenty year period in recent Ulster memory. On August 15, 2018, our friends and many others joined hands near the site of the attack. They tolled a bell 32 times, once for each of their neighbors killed there, and then one more for all the souls lost in atrocities around the world. A moment of silence and a prayer service followed.
The story of Northern Ireland is, in many ways, a tale of two churches. Too often, it has been church that created or exacerbated the divisions in Northern Irish society. Yet, Omagh’s churches, including the two I visited, now are closer than ever before. Each day they seek to be the people described by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah will be published in the Spring of 2021.
