Sir, - Your columnist Vincent Browne is always worth reading for the acute intelligence, forthrightness and honesty he brings to what he writes. I was, however, astonished to read under his byline on August 19th this reference to the Omagh bombers: "Evil they may be, but cowardly hardly. No coward assembles a bomb and drives it primed in the car at risk to his/her own life as well as liberty. . ."
Whatever Mr Browne says, these persons certainly fit my definition of cowardice. It is scarcely the act of a brave or decent person to assemble a massive bomb, drive it unprimed and therefore relatively safely through the streets, park it in a busy thoroughfare on market day (also for Roman Catholics a Holy Day of Obligation), abandon the now primed bomb in a misleading location and then saunter casually through the holiday crowds, most of them families, mothers and small children, knowing perfectly well that his actions will result in the deaths and terrible mutilation of many of these casual strollers.
It would indeed have been a courageous act if, realising the carnage they were about to cause, these people had neutralised or driven the bomb away again or given personal warning of what was likely to happen - which action would have perhaps placed their liberty, but certainly not their lives, at risk.
Much braver in my opinion is the controlled and steady leadership of those within the republican movement like Gerry Adams, who have chosen the difficult and sometimes thankless course of long-term political commitment. Although not an admirer of the past history of Provisional Sinn Fein or its leadership, I have to say that it was, in my opinion, a wise and courageous thing of Mr Adams to abandon his previous policy of many years' standing of refusing to "engage in the politics of condemnation", and to condemn outright the activities of the so-called Real IRA. I hope that, in the aftermath of the Omagh catastrophe, the leaders of the Provisional IRA, now on ceasefire, will find themselves able to make a gesture that shows a similar commitment to democracy in the decommissioning of their remaining arsenal of explosives. To many people like myself it seems logical that the only reason now for such people to hold onto hoards of explosive material would be to enable them at some stage in the future to employ it in a manner that would have similar tragic consequences to what we have just been forced to witness at Omagh. - Yours, etc., Senator David Norris,
Seanad Eireann,
Baile Atha Cliath 2.