OMAGH - August 15, 1998 Across the border for the first time, on a Thursday, the Senior Citizens travelled by coach to Omagh. Driving over tidy roads, past the red postal boxes and well-tilled fields, they soaked in the Northern landscape. The following Saturday, television pictures showed crumbled buildings, ambulance men carrying broken bodies, many covered in burns and caked blood, and every age group standing about in shock. On Sunday the TV announcers gave them the news: twenty-eight dead, two hundred injured, most of them young. Confused and frightened, the Senior Citizens now need courage to cross the border, be among people they know want peace. -- Mary Guckian, "The Road to Gowel" (2000) Omagh is in Co. Tyrone