By Northern standards, Omagh has always been a quiet town. Before Saturday it had seen no atrocities like the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen to the west, and no sectarian confrontations like those in Cookstown and Portadown to the east.
The novelist Benedict Kiely, who used scenes from his youth there in his novels and short stories, always remembered it fondly. "All in all it was a good town to grow up in . . . The people were friendly and fair and, as Ulster towns go, not at all given to bigotry."
One of the reasons given by locals for the good atmosphere was that the town had been a British army garrison town since the middle of the last century, so its citizens were used to seeing soldiers in its streets and pubs.
For many years it was also the headquarters of the local regiment, the Inniskilling Fusiliers. Local girls, Protestant and Catholic, often married soldiers.
But Omagh did not escape the injustices of the Stormont regime. Local Protestants admit that for many years the Unionist-dominated council did not fairly represent its demographic make-up.
Apart from the barracks, its raison d'etre has been as an old-fashioned country market town. Although it is a good size, with a population of about 20,000, it has little industry.
Its largest single employer is the local factory of Desmonds, the Derry-based clothing manufacturer which supplies Marks and Spencer.
In a town of about 60 per cent Catholics and 40 per cent Protestants, community relations have been relatively cordial. There is a philosophy of "live and let live", with the Catholics tending to live at the Derry Road end of the town, and the Protestants around the Hospital Road at the other end.
Locals point to the gesture of local Catholics when the area's Methodist church was damaged by sectarian vandals 18 months ago. The parish priest at the Sacred Heart Church organised a collection among his congregation to help with repairs and delivered it to the Methodist minister before Sunday service.
Divisions have sharpened in Omagh during the years of the Troubles, as elsewhere in the North. To the outsider it has come to look like any divided northern town, with the Catholic working-class estates dense with Tricolours and the Protestant estates lined with red, white and blue kerbstones.
The large Strathroy estate, built in the 1970s as a mixed estate, is now largely Catholic. Sinn Fein is now the largest party on Omagh District Council, but this is misleading, since the party has its main strongholds in surrounding rural areas like Carrickmore, Beragh, Dromore and Trillick.
The party allegiances in the town are evenly balanced, with one SDLP councillor, one independent SDLP, one Unionist, one DUP, one Alliance, one independent socialist and one Sinn Feiner - the anti-Belfast Agreement rebel, Mr Francie Mackey.