Fintan O’Toole: The more incomprehensible an event is, the greater our hunger for comprehension

There are two kinds of people in Ireland, divided by age. There are those who, when they heard the news from Creeslough, thought: “Oh God, what a terrible accident.” And there were those who, in that same instant, also thought: “Oh God, please let it be an accident.”

For those of us who are in the second group, this mental reflex was entirely involuntary. It was the return of the repressed, a reaction springing from a dread that was buried deep in the recesses of the unconscious.

On the rational level, it makes little difference whether or not such a terrible event was created on purpose. The “before” and “after” pictures would show the same mundane buildings, then the same frightful rubble.

The anguish is the same whether or not this violence was willed or unintended, whether it was an act of purposeful malice or a horrific happenstance.

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For the survivors, the bereaved, the community of a small and intimate place, the pain is unfathomable either way. Lives have been taken. Loves have been shattered.

The fabric of reality has been rent and will never be fully repaired. Meaning has been exploded into the cold atoms of a cruel absurdity.

If you’ve lost a child or a parent or a spouse in this way, “why?” is a question you will be asking for the rest of your life and never answering. No explanation can have any real weight when such suffering is placed on the other end of the scales.

But for the rest of us, the mere consumers of this news, there is always that quick, somewhat shameful impulse to deflect the shock by reaching for an explanation. The more incomprehensible an event is, the greater our hunger for comprehension. We dull the terror of the unimaginable by making it seem explicable.

The paradox of living through the Troubles was that, at this level, fatal explosions were almost always caused — and therefore comprehensible. We knew, at least in general terms, that they were episodes in a story, links in a long chain of wilful violence.

We were confronted, not just with the hideous anarchy of the events themselves, but with the cold calculation of the killers

The victims — on Talbot Street in Dublin or Market Street in Omagh, at the cenotaph in Enniskillen or on Bridge Street in Warrington, in McGurk’s bar in Belfast or the Horse and Groom in Guildford — were random. Bad luck played the recurring central role in these terrible dramas: the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the Applegreen station in Creeslough at three o’clock on Friday afternoon.

There’s a great and ferocious poem by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska in which she imagines a terrorist watching, from a safe distance, the bar in which he has just planted the bomb that will go off in four minutes.

He follows with his eyes a girl with a green ribbon walking along the street, but then a bus passes between him and her and he doesn’t know whether or not she went into the bar: “We shall see when they bring out the bodies.”

For those of us who are old enough to remember, that bar could be Frizzell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road or Eakin’s grocery in Claudy, or the Oxford Street bus station in Belfast, or the Mulberry Bush pub in Birmingham. That girl with the green ribbon could be any one of the thousands who might or might not be right there, right then, in the wrong place at the wrong time. We would see when they brought out the bodies.

But behind this awful randomness, there was intent. These were not just explosions — they were detonations. The suffering was arbitrary; its infliction was deliberate and purposeful.

Did this make it worse? For the bereaved, the question is impertinent — there is nothing worse than the sudden, extremely violent death of a loved one.

I had no idea that beneath conscious memories, there is this layer of dark instinct. I did not know that the word ‘explosion’, uttered in a familiar Irish context, would trigger that shameful prayer

For the rest of us, though, the sense of intent did indeed make it all worse. We were confronted, not just with the hideous anarchy of the events themselves, but with the cold calculation of the killers.

We were caught between two kinds of madness — one lurid and visceral, one cool and calibrated. We were trapped between them in a psychic no-man’s-land.

In the immediate moment when the news came from Creeslough, those of us who remember this dire disorientation could feel it rising, unbidden and unwanted, within us. Before we could think, before we could take it all in, there was this other sensation, this great fear that someone might have made this vile thing happen.

I did not know it was still there. I had no idea that beneath conscious memories, there is this layer of dark instinct. I did not know that the word “explosion”, uttered in a familiar Irish context, would trigger that shameful prayer: please let this be an accident.

It’s shameful because it seems to diminish the awfulness of what did happen, to imply somehow that the tragedy in Creeslough is less terrible for being unintended. That is of course not true.

To find any consolation in such a catastrophe would be crass. No one, I’m sure, would try to do that. Yet the older half of the Irish population could not avoid, amid the shock, that selfish, troubling sense of relief.