For a while along Market Street there was a clash of civilisations. Just ahead of the torchbearers, the blue Samsung party truck—big television screens, gyrating cheerleaders — blasted Omagh with pre-mixed, mangled chart numbers at volumes not heard by Bob Lingwood since he was subjected to German artillery fire so many years ago. Now Bob is 93, the second oldest torchbearer in the UK Olympic relay and a hero in Omagh where he leads the St Patrick Day procession dressed as the Irish patron saint.
Bob’s taste in music was catered for further up the street by St Eugene’s Brass and Reed Band. “Get me to the Church on Time,” “Hurray for the Red, White and Blue”: you know where you are with the band which grew out of the Irish Temperance movement. Decked out in blue blazers, the musicians perform on the big occasions — church festivals, weddings.
There is Eugene, the Asda supervisor, Pat, a bank manager and, since the average age matches the repertoire, a great number of pensioners. It is not a run-of-the-mill amateur outfit though. Omagh is still tending the scars of the Real IRA car bomb explosion that killed 29 people in the summer of 1998 — and music is helping. The wife of one of the players lost her eye. Just about everybody knows a family that was affected.
“It was a terrible terrible thing but it has drawn us together,” says the band’s conductor Mike Reynolds. “We in Omagh are determined that we are not going to see ourselves as victims.” While Derry still seems in certain respects to be frozen in the 1970s — tourists are taken as the first port of call to the Bloody Sunday memorial — Omagh moved on.
The band has Catholics and Protestants “and everything in between”, says Mike. After the Olympic Flame had passed through town the locals came up to Mike and thanked him for the music. One woman declared her admiration for Bob the torchbearer, still a sporty character despite his advanced age. “He was captured in the Far East during the war, you know,” she says with pride.
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“No, no,” says Mike, “it was the Boche who caught him. Then he came back and ran a shoe factory.”
Young people are coming back too nowadays. “The place is at ease with itself,” says Mike. Maybe that’s why they turned the Torch Relay into a carnival yesterday, long after the Samsung truck had moved on.