A memorial to the victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing that through a series of mirrors will reflect light on to the bomb site will be constructed by the 10th anniversary of the bombing next August, according to Omagh District Council and the memorial designers.
Omagh victims' spokesman Michael Gallagher said he admired the design but had concerns about what wording would be used to describe what happened on August 15th, 1998, when a Real IRA bomb killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twin daughters. His son Aidan was also killed in the attack.
Danny McSorley, chief executive of the council and chairman of the Omagh Memorial Working Group, said an independent facilitator would be appointed to deal separately with the wording or "narrative" to describe the outrage.
A Dublin-based design team saw off competition from 32 Irish, British and international designers to win the award to construct the "futuristic" project in Omagh town centre. Dublin landscape architect Desmond FitzGerald and artist Seán Hillen, originally from Newry, with support from Harry Irvin of the White Young Green engineering and environmental consultancy company, won the contract with their design entitled, "Garden of Light".
The design was exhibited at the Strule Art Centre in Omagh yesterday, although none of the bereaved families was invited to the launch.
The design uses the latest in "heliostat" technology, designers FitzGerald and Hillen explained yesterday. The first focus is on the current memorial garden, which will be replaced by a new garden comprising a pool, a sloping path and silver birch trees. Bluebells will grow in the garden in springtime and poppies later in summer.
Also in the garden will be three mirrors, known as heliostats, which through a computerised system that will track the light of the sun for the next 40 years, will reflect light on to 31 smaller mirrors erected on poles in the garden. These mirrors commemorate the number of victims of the bombing.
The light from the 31 mirrors will be bounced some 100 metres across the street and over buildings on to another single mirror on the gable of a building in Market Street, where the bomb was planted.
This light will be reflected virtually vertically downwards on to a glass pillar, 4.5 metres high, on the location on the street where the bomb exploded.
Inside the glass pillar, a cut glass heart, about the size of a human torso, will be suspended. It is hoped that Tyrone Crystal will make the heart. The wording on the current memorial states the victims were murdered "by a dissident republican terrorist bomb". Mr Gallagher said that similar wording must be placed at the "Garden of Light" because this was the "truth" of what happened over nine years ago.