Buncrana lights 30 candles for the victims of the bomb

The sun and blue skies that have proved so elusive in Donegal for months at last brought a touch of summer to grieving Buncrana's small Market Square on Saturday. It stands at the top of the town, and the crowd of several thousand spilled out from it down the town's main street and up over the brow of the hill.

Two weeks ago many of the same people had gathered here for a joyous festival, but on Saturday Dinny McLaughlin's poignant fiddle rendering of O Riada's Criost an tSil was heard in a silence interrupted only by the sound of gentle weeping and the flap in the breeze of a canvas awning.

Then, on the dot of ten past three, for an interminable minute, there were only the tears, not the body-racking, anguished expressions of pain of the funerals but a quieter and no less intense grief that marks perhaps a second phase of mourning.

They had come from all over the closeknit community of Inishowen, all touched personally in some way by the tragedy, families of the dead, school pals, young and old. Even the clergy officiating at the short, moving, ecumenical ceremony found it difficult to speak, the voices of the Church of Ireland's Canon Sam Barton and Buncrana's parish priest, Father Joseph Carolan, cracking with emotion.

"It is difficult to pray," Father Carolan admitted to the crowd. "Such events would take tears from a stone."

But they offered up prayers for the dead and injured, the bereaved, and "for the perpetrators of this evil and their supporters that they may realise what they have done".

And the town that had greeted Northern Ireland's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, last week with applause heard Father Carolan appeal for prayers for "the RUC, Garda and caring services" which had borne the brunt of responding to the bomb. "Lord comfort your people," they responded. Buncrana has travelled many miles in the last week. As Sister Emmanuel Cullen read out the names of all who died candles were lit for each - three of them from this town, Shaun McLaughlin (12), James Barker (12) and Oran Doherty (8) - and two for the unborn children of Avril and Michael Monaghan. Thirty in all.

The brief ceremony, which included the reading of the message from the Pope and readings from Psalms and Romans, concluded with the singing of Abide With Me.

Among those who joined the vigil were local TDs, the Minister for Tourism and Sport, Dr McDaid, and Ms Cecilia Keaveney, councillors, and Ireland's EU Commissioner, Mr Padraig Flynn.

A sombre Dr McDaid spoke of his deep sadness and the shock to a whole county which had, of all Border counties, been least touched by the Troubles.

Mr Flynn said Buncrana's tragedy had a European significance because of the two Spanish deaths.

Yet there was another sense in which Fernando Blasco (12) and Rocio Abad Ramos (23) were very much part of Buncrana's loss. All the participants in the service spoke of the town's five dead and people have been clearly moved by the willingness of the vast majority of the uninjured Spanish students to stay on to finish their courses.

There is a determination that the links with Spain will be strengthened.