Woman ‘searched for husband and son for years’ after Omagh bomb

A woman whose husband and son were killed in the Omagh bomb has described how years after the blast she would drive around looking for them, believing they were still alive.

Edith White said she would also regularly change her son Bryan’s bed sheets, but that he never came home.

Bryan, 27, was shopping in Omagh with his father Fred when the bomb exploded.

In a statement read out by Hugh Southey KC, Edith told the Omagh Bombing Inquiry that the family has just returned home from a holiday when Fred and Bryan went into town.

She said that not long after they left, she heard a bang.

She said she has little memory of the hours and days after discovering her husband and son had been killed.

Mrs White said: “In the years after the bomb, I just couldn’t accept that they were gone. I don’t understand why they had to be murdered.

“For a number of years after the bomb, I would still go in the car to look for them, thinking that they must be somewhere. Whenever I saw a black Ford car, I would have looked to see if it’s the number plate of Fred’s car.

“I’d left their personal belongings, like toothbrushes, diaries, etc, untouched for many years after the bomb. I regularly would have changed the sheets on Bryan’s bed, but they never came home, and the silence is still there.

“I’ve never been to counselling because I don’t see what use it would be if they did not know Fred or Bryan, but I’m also a private person. We were just a very normal family. The three of us were very close.

“We didn’t socialise that much. We went on holidays and just stuck to our own activities.

“It wrecks your life, and I think if I accept it, then I will just not be able to cope. I need to be able to block it out as best I can and say it can’t have happened, it’s important not to change.

“But I must say, as time gets on, it gets harder to think it hasn’t happened. Sometimes the anger builds up and I have to cry to myself, but then I try to distract myself by doing something else.”

She said the years following the bomb, the media reports about public fall-outs and the government’s response to the incident has added to the pain.

“All the families want to know what happened to their loved ones, but I do feel that how the government has treated us has resulted in a lot of unnecessary disagreements amongst the families,” she added.

“I hope this inquiry will help to unite the families as we all share the same pain and suffering when all our loved ones were murdered.”

A photograph of the pair which was taken the day before the blast shows Fred and Bryan on the last day of their holiday.

In a pre-recorded statement, Fred’s daughter Linda said that her mental and physical health has been impacted by the loss of her father and brother.

She said she has done things differently in life as a result of the atrocity.

“I think the bomb has forced me to relive a lot of trauma and pain and loss from my past,” she added.

Linda read an extract from a poem by Donna Ashworth about grief.

“You don’t lose somebody just once. You lose them every day for a lifetime.”