THE DARKEST HOUR

Here I am, at a distance of over a hundred miles from the scene of the crime, two days later, and even here, even now, I am finding it hard to speak. At 3.10 on Saturday afternoon, a bomb exploded in a maroon Vauxhall Astra at the corner of Market Street and the Dublin Road, in the centre of Omagh town in Co. Tyrone. The scale of the devastation wreaked by the detonation is virtually impossible to describe. What happened in Omagh was the worst, most murderous act of carnage since the onset of the troubles in Northern Ireland in 1968. At the time of writing, 28 people have died and over 200 are injured, some of them terribly mutilated and disfigured for life. A town has had its heart ripped out. Its people have been brutally and mercilessly gutted. And the shock waves have spread across the North and beyond - to Buncrana in Donegal, a town which lost three children in the blast, and further away again to Madrid in Spain, from where two of the innocent victims had come to holiday in Ireland.

Here in the calm of Dublin, there is a palpable sense of desolation. We had imagined - just as people in Belfast, in Derry and in Omagh itself must have imagined - that we had seen an end to all of this. Now newspapers are full of the most terrible, the most chilling stories of the unprecedented devastation that took place in Omagh. Now TV and radio exist to remind us of just how appalling, how grotesque an act of savagery this was. But whatever feelings of desolation or affront we are experiencing, these can be as nothing compared to the utter, infinite, unendurable horror into which the victims of this outrage, and their families and their friends, and the people of Omagh, have been plunged.

You will have read variations on the litany elsewhere. The pregnant woman with her legs blown off. The man with the car wheel embedded in his chest. Two women with their legs amputated. Bits of children's bodies in the rubble. Shrapnel wounds of the most appalling severity. And on the streets of Omagh, and in Tyrone County Hospital, blood, blood and more blood everywhere."Have you ever carried a human limb?" David Graham was reported as saying in The Irish Times, and he followed that with another question."Have you ever had someone die in your arms?"

Nothing that can be said from this distance can match the shocking eloquence of those questions."Have you ever carried a human limb? Have you ever had someone die in your arms?"

There is no way, no way at all, to make sense of this. A community scarred for generations. People scarred for ever. And others snuffed out in the most cowardly, dishonest and dishonourable way imaginable. And to what abominable end? Even putting yourself into the most warped and twisted terrorist mindset seems to yield no possible explanation for such wanton indiscriminate murder on a grand scale.

But now that the deed has been done, the people of Ireland - North and South of the border - are faced with the same question: how do we respond? Clearly there is an immense desire to see those responsible brought to justice, and this is reflected in the language being used by politicians. In what may ultimately be seen as one of the most important symbolic moments in the torturous journey towards a peaceful, stable society in the North, for the first time ever, Gerry Adams has unequivocally condemned a Republican bombing. That much is good. But there is some cause for concern regarding the kind of hardline thinking that seems to be emerging in Dublin and London. It is understandable that Bertie Ahern would speak of crushing the organisation responsible for the atrocity, an objective in which he would undoubtedly have the support of 99.99% of the Irish people, and more. But it is important that the overwhelming support for that objective shouldn't encourage those responsible, including the Taoiseach, to make decisions which are not ultimately going to further the cause of peace and justice.

Predictably, following an outrage of such magnitude, the possibility of using internment as a means of combatting the so-called 'Real IRA' has been suggested. As I write, the Cabinet has yet to meet to discuss the options open to them. However, the language being employed by Ministers suggests that this may well be the favoured one.

I believe that it would be a mistake. Physical-force Republicanism thrives on creating martyrs, and without a doubt, this is the effect that introducing internment would have. Every interned individual has the potential to recruit four newcomers - their children, relatives, friends, admirers - to the cause. Support for the IRA, in every shape and guise, has never been lower. So why hand them a PR weapon that would inevitably form the basis for a fresh recruitment drive? And why, also, risk putting even a few innocent people behind bars?

Within the rule of law, enough can be done to track down the killers. Fit-ups, frame-ups and miscarriages of justice should be avoided. Round-the-clock surveillance and good police work are another thing entirely.

Within the rule of law, enough can be done to put the Real IRA permanently out of business.

- Niall Stokes
Editor