Omagh remembered its dead in a low-key ceremony showing how far down the road it has come yesterday.
New buildings mark the site of the 1998 bombing that claimed 29 lives and two unborn children but the town has not forgotten the victims. Yesterday many shops closed before 1 p.m. so employees could attend a commemoration service at the Garden of Remembrance built after the bombing.
Five hundred people observed a minute's silence at the garden before the service began. The Northern Secretary, Dr John Reid, the Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne, and RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan, as well as Assembly members and the area's Sinn Fein MP, Mr Pat Doherty, all attended the service.
The Lord's Prayer became the Padre Nuestro and the Ar nAthair, a reminder of the Spanish boy, his teacher and the three boys from Co Donegal killed in the explosion.
After the ceremony, flowers were laid on behalf of the Spanish and Irish victims of the bomb and Omagh District Council but it was the personal tributes that were most moving.
One bunch were for Ms Olive Hawkes, a 60-year old Methodist church treasurer who had been in town on a shopping trip. "The years slip by but the heartache lasts," it said. A photo of 15-year-old Lorraine Wilson in her school uniform was enough to show the loss suffered by her family.
Relatives of those killed in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings had planted a tree in solidarity with Omagh. Mr Laurence Rush's comments at a joint RUC/Garda press conference were not what all the bereaved families would have wished, but Mr Stanley McCombe, whose wife Ann was killed in the blast, said they were all looking for those responsible to be called to account.
"If we didn't think we were going to get justice you can't give up, you just can't give up, it keeps you going," he said.
This was the first year the commemoration service was not held at the time the bomb exploded. There are plans to hold services until the five-year point, but the change in timing itself signalled a more low-key approach. At 3.10 p.m., three years to the minute after the bomb went off, life went on. Shoppers came and went at the clothing shop on the site of the fabric shop where so many died.
On the other side of the road is a building site. At 3.10 the only indication of the horror visited on this corner of the town were three slim bouquets of flowers lying against the hoarding, already wilting in the heat.