What was Omagh like this week? How do you begin to describe a people being dragged uncomprehending through a crushing tide of grief, where wave after savage wave of new information pounds them with such relentless force that it seems they might slip under and be swept away to a merciful end? How do you describe a place where a police chief superintendent in full dress uniform stands in a public park, staunching the tears with his knuckles as he tells how his son's girlfriend is dead and how one of his men has lost a child?
A place where once-skittish teenagers lay flowers in a shop doorway where their "dear friend Jolene" had a summer job, along with a card covered in kisses and an unbearably poignant reminder of silly, sweet, girlish times: "No words can describe how much we miss you . . . Just to remind you of our jokes, in case anybody up there hasn't heard it yet: Two cows in a field, one says `moo' and the other says `weird, I was just going to say that'."
A place where an office cleaner who has lost her gentle, quiet, 17-year-old son, fights her heaving sobs to quote the words of Mahatma Gandhi: "There is enough love in the world to neutralise the hatred of millions."
A place where a young girl has lost one eye and been blinded in the other; where a 15-year-old has lost both legs; where a young woman who had just landed a lucrative modelling contract in New York has lost a leg; where a 27year-old mother has been robbed of an eye and half of her face; where another has had both her left arm and left leg blown off; where even today, doctors are reluctant to release a count of those who have lost limbs because that figure may not be final.
A place where clergymen admitted they had no words and one priest, when asked about forgiveness, answered honestly that he didn't "feel able to move into that mode".
How do you describe a place where day after grief-laden day, the streets and roads are filled with men, women and children, ordinary, gentle country people dressed in their Sunday clothes, on their way to another wake, another funeral, another hospital scene of unrelieved horror? A place where a reporter could stand anywhere at all and hear shocking stories of disintegrating lives, made all the more shocking for being so quietly and simply told.
A place where flashbacks to the explosion are already destroying tight family units, and mothers, fathers, sons and daughters can barely function, unable to eat or sleep or banish the images of blackened, dismembered babies and children; of human beings reduced to naked, bloody pulp or little heaps of scorched, shredded rags. Of vibrant young bodies disfigured and horribly burnt, huge chunks of flesh gouged from their bodies and peppered with shrapnel that may continue to ooze for decades. A place where the living are tormented with the guilt of surviving; a place where a nurse told us that he believes the dead are the lucky ones.
How do you stand up at the courthouse, or the Sacred Heart Church or even the county hospital - all built on some of the many steep hills that make up the attractive little market town of Omagh - and not wonder how the scores of the newly-maimed and crippled will negotiate the slopes and the steps, limping or in wheelchairs, the once-proud young and strong, tortured by pain and disfigurement? How will those who witnessed the scenes at the leisure centre last weekend ever return there to swim or play tennis and not relive the wailing and sobbing of the bereaved and the Calvary-like, doom-laden processions to the temporary mortuary to identify the bodies? How will they banish from their minds the nightmares endured by the family whose loved one was identified only after his fingerprints had been taken from the crane he drove, to be matched with the few fingers to which his living, breathing, loving humanity had been reduced by the "Real IRA"?
How will anyone climb the steps of their local hospital again and not recall the thick trails of blood left by the injured and dying filling the corridors - some lying on shop doors turned to makeshift stretchers - the screams of children and adults, some irreparably damaged in mind and body, the anguished wailing of relatives frantically looking for loved ones? How will the nurses fare who had to tiptoe through the blood, forced to choose between desperately-injured patients, compelled to lay bodies on the floor to free the trolleys for the living - "anywhere but the floor", implored one young boy for his dead mother's dignity - forced into stunned efficiency in the face of so many dead and the unspoken horror of numbers still missing? (As late as Sunday evening, the figure of dead and missing was still believed to be 55.)
How will another casualty nurse live with the images of that moment when the first faces to appear before her were those of her young niece and two friends, covered in blood and shrapnel, crying: "Bridie, Bridie, help us, help us . . . " No training shrapnel, crying: "Bridie, Bridie, help us, help us . . . " No training could prepare them for this - "not unless you'd been to Vietnam," said one. A nurse told how she had spent half an hour with a victim in casualty before recognising her as a colleague: "She's stable now but her nursing career is finished".
A ward manager in the psychiatric hospital, Phelim McAleer, told how he comforted his own 12year-old daughter and her friend who had emerged relatively unscathed but hysterical from the blast, then took a neighbour with him to the hospital who was worried about her husband and son. He worked with his colleagues in casualty before taking her to the leisure centre at 9 p.m. It was another 14 hours before it was confirmed that they were dead.
No-one is exaggerating when they remark on how small and close-knit a community this is; five people who lived within half a mile of Phelim McAleer's home lost their lives last Saturday.
"May God have mercy on Omagh," said a Church of Ireland curate as the toll grew higher on Sunday. The town closed down and a terrible silence reigned. The town seemed physically divided in half - one half shattered physically, all of it shattered emotionally. As police and army cordoned off the devastated centre, the floral tributes piled up in other accessible places, the places from which innocent staff and shoppers had been evacuated and herded to their deaths on the directions of the `Real IRA'. At Wattersons's - untouched by the bomb - the ocean of flowers was a tribute to the three staff who died; a fourth who was cruelly injured remains in hospital. At Photo Express - also untouched - the flowers piled up to the memory of young Julia Hughes, another teenager in a summer job; the owner of the shop, Glen Porter, a young father, sustained head injuries. At the Oxfam shop, two other teenagers were remembered - Lorraine Wilson and Samantha McFarland. One shop owner is dead and several severely injured.
"There are so many injured who worked in the shops and so many traumatised," says Michael Gaine, the Kerry-born owner of three businesses and president of the Chamber of Commerce. How can a people so terribly damaged start rebuilding their town when half lies in ruins, the other half is bereft and all are in trauma? Fifty-seven small businesses were destroyed by the `Real IRA' last Saturday. Others will follow. Business life in Omagh has been bleak enough in the past year with the BSE crisis affecting the agricultural hinterland and the weak punt coaxing Northern shoppers south while keeping southern shoppers at home.
`Some with old established businesses and a little money in the bank may decide there's more to life than this and never open again," says Michael Gaine, "but for most of them, they don't have thousands of pounds put aside to tide them over. Rents, rates, electricity, wages, will still have to be paid. I've no money to pay out wages on Friday. You have parttime staff who would have relied on their small earnings for uniforms. That's all gone. The government won't pay for things like that. Yes, I know they say they'll do this or that but our experience tells us that there is too much red tape. You won't get government help till your whole life is laid bare. These are proud people; they don't want to be turned from victim to claimant."
We are sitting in Hawthorn House, the lovely old manor house that he runs as a restaurant and small hotel, a Tyrone oasis of exquisite food and hospitality with a notable chef in Donal Keane. Open less than a year, it's a dream come true for Michael Gaine: "But the way I feel now is, if someone walked in here and offered to buy the place, I'd let it go. My heart isn't it in now." It's a common feeling around the town.
"You'd feel ashamed to open up," said one shopkeeper, whose premises are unscathed. "We're the lucky ones. It's as though we have an unfair advantage." But even now, some see a dawning of hope. The spirit of friendship and generosity that burned so fiercely all this week - even towards strangers - is coming through in plans to take new premises and help to relaunch the businesses of injured traders. An initiative already underway between organisations for the disabled and local bodies will now take a great leap forward.
Several voluntary counselling groups have established themselves in the one-stop emergency co-ordination centre set up by the district council, along with teams from the social services, from the compensation bureau, from environmental health, the RUC - a one-stop shop, in other words, for people who lost everything in the bomb, which could be anything from a week's wages to a small business. But as the director of Community Services, David Bolton - a man who has seen Enniskillen and other horrors, through 10 years of horror, put it: "the real test will come in a several years time when we look to see what supports are still there". For outsiders in Omagh this week, images will remain ingrained forever. There was the terrible sense of vulnerability evident in the funeral cortege of one young victim on Wednesday, when a police outrider was knocked off his motorbike at a junction. All along the line of cars, people jumped out and began to run; others simply stood and sobbed, unable to comprehend why this was being visited upon them.
There was the reaction of the crowd on Drumragh Bridge after the vigil on Tuesday when about 30 of the police forensic team trudged up from the cordoned-off bomb site in their yellow jackets. One man began to applaud as they passed, which soon turned to a ripple and finally to a full-hearted emotional acknowledgement of their terrible job. Once again, tears appeared in grown men's eyes and many lowered their gaze. Above all, even in the midst of their grief in this broken town, there will be the memory of the horror in people's eyes when anyone suggested that perhaps the `Real IRA' had meant to lure them into the path of the bomb. No.
In their humanity, they could not accept that others could be so devoid of it. One man working at the coalface of the tragedy put his thoughts into words on Sunday: "We are vulnerable in the face of your guns, your baseball bats and your hurley sticks. Your bombs tear us apart, limb from limb; loved-one from loved-one. We are left afraid, and our hearts and our heads are filled with the terrors of our nightmares, the loneliness of our pain and the longing of our grief. Your deeds destroy the ordinariness and beauty of life. So, given our vulnerability, there is only one thing to ask. We ask you to pity our humanity."