Engraved in memory – Frank McNally on recollections of first-time fatherhood, funerals, and learning how to hug

My first-born child and only daughter turned 25 last month, and I don’t know which of us was more shocked. Of course, her birth still only seems like last week, even if the calendar insists it was in a different century. The past is another country, as the man said. So was the location of Roisín’s milestone birthday. A graduate in German and sociology, she currently works in Berlin.

But the happy memories of her arrival into the world brought sombre recollections too. It also meant that a quarter century had passed since the Omagh bombing, an event with which her early days are inextricably linked.

I’ll always remember where I was when that news broke: in a bedroom furniture shop in Dublin with the then three-week-old Roisín and her mother. I was full of the feelings new fathers feel and carrying the baby in one of those front-loaded slings that heightened the sense of protectiveness.

When a radio in the background reported the bomb, my first reaction was the typical one of horror, and I suppose despair that this should have happened so soon after the Belfast Agreement. But my second thought was about work. “I’ll have to go to Omagh,” I said, probably with a sigh.

‘The trial of the century’ – Frank McNally on a notorious child murder of 100 years ago

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Liberal outlook — Brian Maye on Sheelagh Murnaghan, an indomitable presence in NI politics

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Change of tune – Alison Healy on not being a songbird

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‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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As one of The Irish Times’s more recent recruits of the period, I was regularly sent North.

That was the big story in those years, and by 1998, it had become a good-news one. Until then. Sure enough, an hour later, the Newsdesk called. But it was a Saturday evening and we were a newspaper that didn’t print on Sundays. Online coverage, like my daughter, was in its infancy.

So I pleaded to go up first thing in the morning instead and was thereby spared witnessing the immediate aftermath of Omagh’s worst day.

It was still grim Sunday morning, and for the rest of the week. I spent one subsequent night counting coffins as they left an army base in hearses, bound for the various bereft homes.

Then there was an afternoon being driven around by a local priest who pointed out the wake houses that dotted the countryside. After that, there were the funerals.

But a funny thing happened at one of those that also still lives with me all this time later. I know funny things shouldn’t happen at funerals, especially in such tragic circumstances. And yet, in Ireland at least, they often do.

I had arrived late at the rural church, which was full. So I stayed outside with the overspill of mourners listening to the service on PA. It soon came to the part where (long before Covid put an end to the ritual in most places) we were about to offer each other the sign of peace.

On this occasion, however, the priest decided that something more than a perfunctory handshake was called for. So instead of the usual formula of words, he directed everyone to turn to the person next to them “and hold that person in your arms”.

Inside the packed church, where the family and closest friends were and the congregation was already shoulder to shoulder, I’m sure this felt like an easy, natural thing to do.

Outside, among the mostly male congregants standing apart from each other, it was greeted with silent dread.

These men were not natural huggers, I could tell. In the GAA circles that many moved in, even excited goal celebrations are by tradition solitary affairs, with minimal contact. And I knew how they felt, being myself from a border town where hugging was secretly frowned on too, outside of marriage at least.

But I had lived long enough in Dublin, mixing with people for whom social hugs came cheap, to have developed a workable technique. Then there was my new paternity, and the baby sling, which had been a crash course in the prolonged embrace of another human being, albeit a very small one.

So I was just about ready to reach out to the burly Tyrone man nearest me, with both arms. But he must have froze – or refroze – me with a glance, because my arms stayed where they were. There were no hugs outside the church. Instead, somebody ended the momentary stand-off by shaking hands as usual, and everyone else followed. The priest, after all, could not see us.

I used to write a weekly humour column elsewhere in this paper. And God forgive me, I wrote about that there not long after. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it had happened in Omagh: it was way too soon. Although otherwise faithfully recorded, the incident had to be slightly fictionalised, as having happened at a funeral “a while ago”, somewhere “down the country”.