On a Saturday afternoon in August 1998, the streets of Omagh were full of back-to-school shoppers, mothers with prams, Spanish exchange students on a day trip, and families just going about ordinary Saturday business. At 3:10 that afternoon, a car bomb planted by the Real Irish Republican Army detonated in the town centre. Twenty-nine people were killed - fourteen women, one of them carrying twins, nine children, and five men. Hundreds more were wounded. It remains the single worst atrocity of the Troubles, and it happened in a town that had, until that moment, been known mostly for its rivers and its quiet.
The name comes from the Irish An Ómaigh, meaning the virgin plain - a tract of open ground in a country where open ground was rare. The Drumragh and the Camowen flow down out of the surrounding hills and join here to form the Strule, and the town grew up around that meeting of waters. A monastery is said to have stood here as early as 792, and a Franciscan friary followed in 1464. The settlement was formally founded as a town in 1610, during the Plantation of Ulster. Fugitives sheltered here during the 1641 Rebellion, and in 1689 King James II passed through on his way to besiege Derry. Williamite supporters later burned the place. Omagh kept being founded, burned, and refounded - a pattern that the twentieth century would not entirely break.
In 1768, Omagh replaced Dungannon as the county town of Tyrone, and the trappings of administration followed. The railways arrived in stages - Londonderry in 1852, Enniskillen in 1854, Belfast by 1861 - turning the town into a junction. St Lucia Barracks were completed in 1881, the county hospital opened in 1899, and a Town Hall opened in 1915 that would host Anew McMaster and Micheál Mac Liammóir before being demolished decades later for the Strule Arts Centre. The railways closed in stages too - Enniskillen line in 1957, Londonderry line in 1965 - leaving all of Tyrone without a single passenger train. The 190-acre St Lucia Barracks closed in 2007. The town has spent the years since trying to repurpose what the empire and the railways left behind, including a £120 million plan to consolidate six secondary schools onto the old army site.
The bomb that day was meant for the courthouse. The warnings called in beforehand were inaccurate, and police, trying to clear the area they were told to clear, inadvertently moved shoppers toward the actual device. The car was parked on Market Street outside Kells's drapery shop. When it went off, it killed people who had no connection to any side of the conflict - a Spanish teacher and her young student, an eighteen-month-old toddler, a mother pregnant with twins, teenagers who had ducked into a shop seconds before. The Real IRA - a splinter faction opposed to the Good Friday Agreement that had been signed four months earlier - claimed responsibility within days. No one was ever convicted in a criminal court for the bombing. A garden of remembrance now stands on Market Street, with a glass obelisk and a heliostat that catches sunlight and directs it onto a memorial pool every August 15th at 3:10 PM.
The world expected Omagh to break. It did not. The funerals went on for days, attended by leaders from London, Dublin, Belfast, and Washington. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern came; so did Bill and Hillary Clinton. The town buried its dead together - Catholic and Protestant, Irish and British, locals and visitors - because the bomb had not bothered to distinguish between them and the grief would not either. In the years since, Omagh has rebuilt, slowly. The OASIS plaza, funded by the European Union, reclaimed a derelict stretch of riverbank in 2015. New shops opened on Market Street where the old ones had stood. Trouble has not entirely ended - a car bomb killed police constable Ronan Kerr in 2011, and an off-duty senior officer was shot at a sports complex in 2023 - but the town has refused to let those acts define what it is.
Beyond the centre, the town spreads into townlands with names that catch the ear - Conywarren, an old word for a rabbit warren, Killyclogher, Lisanelly, Mullaghmore. The Ulster American Folk Park sits just outside town, built around the cottage where Thomas Mellon was born in 1813 before his family emigrated to Pennsylvania; his son Andrew became Secretary of the US Treasury and one of the richest men in America. The actor Sam Neill was born here in 1947. The playwright Brian Friel grew up near Knockmoyle. Linda Martin, who won Eurovision in 1992 with Why Me, came from Omagh, as did the songwriter Jimmy Kennedy, who gave the world Red Sails in the Sunset and Teddy Bears' Picnic. The Gortin Glens Forest Park lies 16 kilometres north, with deer and waterfalls, and the Sperrin Mountains rise to the northeast. The rivers still meet at the centre of town and still flood, as they did in 1909, 1929, 1954, 1969, 1987, 1999, and most recently in 2007.
Omagh sits at 54.60 degrees north, 7.30 degrees west, in west-central Northern Ireland. The town is 68 miles west of Belfast and 34 miles south of Derry. Nearest international airport is Belfast International (EGAA), about 50 miles east; City of Derry Airport (EGAE) is closer at around 30 miles north. From cruising altitude in clear weather, watch for the Sperrin Mountains to the northeast and the looping silver thread of the River Strule winding south through the Tyrone countryside. Best viewed from 4,000-6,000 feet to catch the river system and the surrounding green patchwork. Northern Ireland weather is reliably damp; expect cloud and rain more often than not.