A film made so people won't forget

Tomorrow RTÉ is showing a docudrama that re-creates the horror of the Omagh bombing and its aftermath. For some survivors of the atrocity, watching it is unbearable, reports Fionola Meredith

'Enjoy!' chirps the Channel 4 publicist as she welcomes guests to the cinema, in Belfast. Her breezy greeting jars with the sombre occasion, a private screening of Omagh, an unflinchingly graphic docudrama that chronicles the events and aftermath of Saturday, August 15th, 1998, when a Real IRA bomb claimed 31 lives in the town, including those of unborn twins. It was the single worst atrocity in 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.

Nearly six years later, just before the new film is shown on television, victims' families and survivors have gathered to be the first to watch its gruelling re-creation of the day. Watching the events leading up to the explosion re-enacted on screen - an unsanitised, explicit account, at their request - proves unbearable for many. The tense silence in the cinema is punctuated by stifled sobs as yet another family member leaves in tears.

The ear-shattering moment, less than 20 minutes in to the film, when the bomb explodes causes one survivor to experience a terrifying flashback. Her screams rise over the soundtrack as she lies, writhing and hyperventilating, in the aisle. "It's just a film," one man murmurs gently to her in an effort to help. "No!" she shrieks as she is led away. "This can happen! This can happen! This can happen!"

The woman's appalling memories flooding back in a venue more commonly used for screening bland romantic comedies is just one of the many uncomfortable juxtapositions a film such as Omagh gives rise to. The controversy that often surrounds docudramas stems from similar contradictions: neither purely fiction nor purely fact, they occupy a shifting no-man's-land between the two.

Yet the makers of Omagh, a British-Irish collaboration between the writers Paul Greengrass and Guy Hibbert, the director Pete Travis and the producers Ed Guiney and Don Mullan, were adamant that factual accuracy should be paramount. Painstaking research and nearly three years of close collaboration with Omagh Support & Self-Help Group have produced a film that pays scrupulous attention to detail. Everyone on screen corresponds to somebody present on the day of the bomb, and the set of Market Street, which was built in Navan, is similarly precise, following a replica in the production office.

Travis says: "You can't approach the film in any other way than as if you are filming a fly-on-the-wall documentary. What you are after is vivid realism. You want to tell a truthful story, so it's all hand-held cameras, no lights, no artifice of any kind. You have to capture a moment in time and try and get it right first time."

The production team says the families' campaign to bring the bombers to justice is both the basis of the film and its source of legitimacy. But all the research, scale models and shaky hand-held-camera shots in the world cannot change the fact that Omagh is not a fly-on-the-wall documentary recording events as they happen but a dramatic re-creation. It involves the weaving of many complex, contradictory accounts in to a single, seamless master narrative that effectively claims to provide the defining story, the full and coherent truth. Yet truth is always inflected by interpretation, perspective, imagination and motivation. It is never full and final.

Greengrass, the award-winning director of the controversial 2002 film Bloody Sunday, seems aware of the pitfalls of trying to re-create truth in the name of drama. He recently told the Observer: "We should not be coy about how you can only go so far by gathering facts. At a certain point you enter the imagination, you compress episodes, you select incidents and you synthesise it in to a two-hour narrative. You have to be prepared to defend publicly those decisions."

One judgment that may provoke controversy is the decision to emphasise the December 2001 report by Nuala O'Loan, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland (played by Brenda Fricker), on the RUC's investigation of the bombing. It found that the victims and their families had been let down by the flawed leadership of the force's then chief constable, Ronnie Flanagan.

The film reflects the deep frustration and betrayal the families feel: as far as they are concerned, police incompetence means the bombers have not been brought to justice. They also suspect that the investigation was deliberately mishandled, to stop a more successful effort from hampering the peace process.

Accordingly, the families have no qualms in endorsing the truth and the necessity of the film. Their abiding motivation in supporting the making of Omagh has been to advance their campaign to bring the bombers to justice and to hold to account politicians and police on both sides of the Border who promised so much but delivered so little.

The film focuses on the death of 21-year-old Aiden Gallagher and the consequences for his family. His father, Michael, the support group's quietly spoken chairman, is unequivocal about the value of the film. "We want people to see what terrorism can do to a family - my family, other families - and to a community. Ultimately, this film has not been made for the victims but for a wider community, so as to tell them about what terrorism really does and about the grief and striving to achieve justice that follow in its wake. If that message gets through it will have succeeded."

Was it not unbearable to watch? "It was very painful, difficult viewing by any standards. And many of the things that I've seen today have been things that I've been trying to bury in my subconscious over the past five and a half years. But at the end of it I have a sense of pride that we have done something that, sadly, the rest of Northern Ireland should have done: we've put our politics and our religion aside and we've come together and demanded justice."

Stanley McCombe, whose wife, Anne, also died, says it was a "very powerful, brilliant film true to every fact. This film was made so people wouldn't forget this was the most cowardly act ever performed in the Troubles of Northern Ireland. If people can live with this after watching it there's definitely something wrong. But maybe it will wrench someone's heart so they come forward with good information that will lead to prosecutions".

As the families emerge from the cinema they look fragile, careworn, weighed down by the brutally intense experience of watching their loved ones' violent deaths re-enacted. They looked lost, disoriented, as they gather in small groups to collect their thoughts and emotions.

Marion Radford, who lost her 16-year-old son, Alan, that day, says that, although she supported the making of the film, watching it had made her feel sick. "I tried to detach myself, tell myself this didn't really happen, that it's just a film. It's a kind of denial, I suppose. But I've always been in denial since the bomb. I know Alan's dead, but I don't like to think he died that way."

Godfrey Wilson, whose daughter Lorraine was killed, says he was in two minds about coming to see Omagh, but he believes it has "taken the argument of the victims forward and the argument of the group in fighting for justice. Hopefully, someone will see this film and be touched. Hopefully, someone that knows something will come forward and give information about what happened".

Later, at a post-screening reception, Caroline Martin, who lost her elder sister, Esther Gibson, says she fears that the story of Omagh is fading from public memory. "A lot of people are just glad it's over, glad to get on with their own lives. I hope that the film will open the eyes of millions of people to the pain we're still going through." Struggling to speak through her tears, she continues: "We're hurting with pain, day in, day out. When I go home tomorrow it's back to pain, pain, pain. Everybody else goes out, goes to work. I can't do that." She breaks off, inarticulate with grief, sobbing quietly as hotel staff move discreetly through the room, offering canapés. One more uncomfortable incongruity, one more reminder that it's not just a film. It can happen.

Omagh is on RTÉ 1 at 9.25 p.m. tomorrow and on Channel 4 on Thursday