`I think, as any parent would, of my own sons and daughter. I know I would go mad with grief should it happen to them." The words of Tony Blair, the simplicity of his reaction, go right to the heart of the matter. It was the very ordinary details of the lives so cruelly snuffed out last Saturday in Omagh which brought uncontrollable tears to the eyes and a desire to hug one's own children in wordless gratitude.
The Spanish and Irish kids on a day trip to the wonderful Ulster Folk Park, the young man who had gone into town to spend part of his first week's wages on contact lenses, teenagers working in a charity shop, students waiting for their exam results. It may be that the wave of revulsion will mark a watershed. We have been here so many times before. The statements from the `Real IRA' expressing regret at the casualties and announcing a "suspension" of its activities have been greeted with scepticism by most politicians. But we do know that the anger which followed atrocities like Enniskillen did have an effect in shifting attitudes away from support for the armed struggle and towards politics.
Already the outrage directed against those who planted the Omagh bomb has been expressed in epithets with which Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have long been familiar. "Mindless killers, psychopaths, the dregs of republicanism" - these are words which may help in lancing the immediate pain. But Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness know very well that the public mood is volatile, that outrage at Omagh will fade, that the argument which underlies this atrocity will not go away.
From the very beginning of the peace process the first priority for the republican leadership has been to avoid a split. This went beyond an understandable desire to prevent a fratricidal feud. Over and over again, we were told by Sinn Fein leaders that if a split occurred it would mean that those left on the outside would be the most ruthless of the militarists. Understandably, Adams was determined to bring the whole republican movement with him.
It is now clear that a substantial group within the IRA does not believe the peace process is going anywhere. They see the Belfast Agreement as a recipe for disaster, a makeshift solution which is doomed to failure in the long term, leaving the nationalist community in Northern Ireland in a worse state than before.
Many of these people, out of respect for Gerry Adams, have gone along reluctantly with the political process. The difficulties facing the Sinn Fein leadership were seen publicly when the party was forced to reconvene the ardfheis earlier this year. The appearance of the Balcombe Street gang and other prominent republican prisoners was clearly designed to reassure delegates the IRA was on board. And it seemed that these tactics had carried the day when the ardfheis voted to support the agreement.
Gerry Adams's reading of broader public opinion within the nationalist community, North and South, was quite correct. What the overwhelming majority of people on both parts of the island want, and what they voted for in the May referendum, is the promise of peace and political structures which will allow the constitutional future to look after itself.
But there are still people within the republican movement who see the Belfast Agreement as offering nothing but a reconstituted Stormont, with David Trimble as prime minister and a solid rump of unionists who are determined to resist any moves towards radical change. As such, they argue, the accord is doomed to fail and will only prolong the agony of sectarian divisions in the North. They see Adams and McGuinness as having been duped, by both governments, into selling out the fundamental principles of republicanism.
I do not pretend to any knowledge of the `Real IRA', but I have been to meetings of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement and I have no doubt that these convictions, albeit mistaken in my view, are passionately and sincerely held. It is all too tempting to dismiss these people as trapped in a time warp dating back to the First Dail and beyond, but one has only to look at the largely uncritical celebrations of the 1798 bicentenary to wonder whether these views may not be much more widely shared.
This is the problem which faces the two governments as they meet to discuss what security measures should be taken in order to prevent another Omagh. On the one hand, public opinion demands that the bombers be brought to justice. On the other, some of the measures that have been discussed, like internment, could lead to their being regarded as innocent victims within the republican community, with wholly counterproductive results.
IT does seem, from talking to sources who know about these things, that the IRA - Real and Provisional - is in a dangerous state of flux, with many of its activists capable of moving forward with Adams into politics, or backwards towards violence,
This poses an even more acute dilemma for the Sinn Fein leadership. At the moment Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are under intense pressure to distance themselves from the `Real IRA', in order to prove that they are now fully paid up members of the democratic political community. Mr Adams has gone further than ever before in "condemning" the Omagh bomb. But there are increasingly insistent suggestions that the republican leadership should make further gestures of commitment to the peace process, either by decommissioning some weapons, or urging its own supporters to give any information to the security forces.
The immediate reaction that I've had when I've put these suggestions to Sinn Fein members is that any move down this road could: a) put Messrs Adams and McGuinness at physical risk, and: b) precipitate a full-scale, fratricidal republican feud. Everyone in their senses agrees that this would be disastrous. That leaves the other option - the long, hard slog of politics.
It may just be possible that the enormity of public grief and revulsion will work to persuade the various dissident republican groups to abandon violence. But, although it seems almost a cliche to make the point again, the task is to persuade the majority of those, on both sides, who are still tempted in this direction, that politicians working together can bring about change. That is why it is so important that one of the first developments, after the immediate acts of mourning, has been to bring David Trimble to Dublin for talks with Bertie Ahern.