I had hoped that I would never have to write a column like this. What happened a week ago in Omagh was cold and calculated mass murder. It left 28 people dead and hundreds maimed. The psychological damage has yet to manifest itself but we have already been warned that not just the bereaved and the injured will be affected - the emergency services staff, the citizens of Omagh who helped at the scene, medical, nursing and paramedical staff will all have to deal with the horror perpetrated that day.
It is very difficult to express one's feelings following an outrage like the bombing of Omagh. Sadness, numbness, disbelief and anger. Those words all apply, but somehow they seem too weak when you look at the television footage, see the pictures and read the newspaper articles, hear the stories on the radio. I won't ever forget the funerals - the coffins, some heartrendingly small, the flowers, the tears and the total devastation of those left behind.
And how can you describe the people responsible for it all? They are evil, depraved men. But those words have been used before. The urge is to hunt through dictionaries and thesauri to find some new word that expresses your revulsion. A word that covers their utter inhumanity, their calculated viciousness, their total contempt for life, and the warped mentality that both justifies their actions in the face of objective reality and allows them to feel no remorse for the abomination they have visited on an entire town.
What they did on Saturday was brutal and their actions since then have served to compound their misdeed. The nonsense about the warning, the delay in admitting responsibility, the talk of a commercial target and, most contemptible of all, their expression of sorrow.
There is no justification, no excuse, and no rationalisation that can be used to explain those men's actions. You just cannot plant a 500-lb bomb in the middle of a busy market town on a Saturday afternoon and call it anything other than an act of cowardly, reckless iniquity.
Over the last three decades, we have, as a nation, become numbed to the horror that was perpetrated on an almost daily basis on this island. We have had reports of bombings, shootings and punishment beatings as an integral part of most news bulletins. Inevitably our emotional reactions have been dulled. It has been impossible to respond adequately to all of these atrocities. Intellectually, we have been able to condemn the acts of terrorism but the constant bombardment had removed a part of our humanity. We ran out of tears to shed. And then we had the promise of peace. The constant slaughter seemed to be over. Yes, there were still barbarous acts being committed but we "knew" peace was within our grasp. The bombing of Omagh was so extreme, so shocking that we were forced into emotional reactions. It reminded us we were human beings and made us angry at having part of our humanity suppressed for so long.
But we cannot allow that anger to lead us into overreaction. We cannot put the rule of law to one side no matter how tempting that may be. We cannot take the law into our own hands, though we would wish to punish those responsible as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. We cannot put justice to one side because that is what those men did. We cannot become like them. Not just because it would be wrong, not just because that would make us less than fully human again, but because it would be playing into their hands. They must be pursued within the law so that there is no possibility of generating sympathy among the misguided for those creatures.
Our Government's reaction has been precisely right. It has acted swiftly to adjust our laws to enable the gardai to arrest and successfully prosecute all the members of this proscribed organisation and to do so legally.
On Thursday night, we saw the other option in action. President Clinton ordered a massive missile attack on two sites in Afghanistan and Sudan. The attack was justified as both a retaliatory blow against those responsible for bombing US embassies in Africa and as a pre-emptive strike designed to prevent further planned attacks against American citizens. During the press conference announcing these attacks, it was claimed that Osama bin Laden had declared war on the US and, therefore, a military offensive was an appropriate reaction. This, I believe, was a mistake. It offered some validation for the outpourings of this terrorist. It provides martyrs to this man's cause. It will have drummed up sympathy for his organisation.
He will be able to point to the heavy-handed and illegal behaviour of the most powerful country in the world in its efforts to stamp out what will inevitably be characterised as a group of freedom fighters, an army of revolutionaries. President Clinton has temporarily appeased the people of the US but the cost will be a terrorist campaign that will not end in the foreseeable future.
Our Government has not made that mistake and it cannot.
There is something else we have to do and that we have already started to do. In the face of such horror there is a natural reaction to try to find something positive, some faint promise that something good can come out of all of the horror. For me the hope that came out of this hopeless situation was born earlier this week in Buncrana Catholic Church. It was here that President Mary McAleese, Gerry Adams, Seamus Mallon, David Trimble and Martin McGuinness joined together to pray for the dead, dying and injured. As long as people who have spent so long so opposed to the others' views are capable of grieving together and working together then the terrorists will fail.