Kevin Skelton recounts the Omagh bombing. He recalls finding his wife Philomena in the rubble and the lasting trauma.
Kevin Skelton said he will never forget the horrors. He remembers the smell and the victims’ cries. His wife, Philomena, died in the attack. She was shopping with him and their daughters.
Philomena Skelton was a mother of four, only 39 years old. Mr. Skelton described their differences; he liked refereeing games, while she enjoyed staying home, knitting, and reading. He admitted he couldn’t even boil an egg. His wife did everything for him, she was a “homebird,” he explained.
The family welcomed a Romanian orphan in 1997, an act he called one of “pure kindness.” After his wife’s death, he kept helping the charity. He later married the Romanian girl’s mother, who had also stayed at his place. The family went to Omagh to buy school items on the Saturday when the bomb exploded.
They were inside a shop when a traffic warden warned them about a bomb scare. One daughter wondered if the bomb was in a specific car. But nobody thought it was real, and they walked past the car and into a store.
Mr. Skelton said he often thinks about that moment. They had walked past the car just before the explosion. He got tired of shopping, so he left his wife and one daughter in a shop and entered another store.
The bomb then exploded, and the shop front was blown out. He walked outside from where the window had been and discovered his wife in the rubble. He checked for a pulse but couldn’t find it.
Skelton started digging, thinking his daughter Shauna was also trapped, and he believed she was buried under her mother. He described the terrible things he saw while digging, saying no one should ever see such things. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the smell of burning flesh haunts him.
He thought Shauna was also dead and didn’t know about his other two daughters. His whole family could have been killed, he said, adding that the town’s devastation was unbelievable. He doesn’t understand how so many lived.
He was led out of the shop, but he kept going back to find his daughter. No one could calm him down. Then, a stranger shouted to him, asking, “You have a wee ginger-haired girl?”. Skelton replied that he did. The stranger said she was in a hospital. This was when he learned Shauna was still alive.
Ninety minutes later, he learned his other daughters were alive. He identified his wife’s body the next day at an Army camp.