Enniskilleners of my generation often have a particular conversation when we meet new people from across the water, once we reveal where we’re from. It starts with an acknowledgement that yes, you’re right, something did happen there. It mentions, flinching slightly as the words confirm the cold reality of it, that someone placed a bomb at a crowded war memorial and killed 12 people, mostly pensioners and a nurse.
Then, immediately, there is a very powerful urge to explain that this brutal act never defined the town and did not define our childhood. There were those at the scene and those who lost loved ones whose lives were changed. The rest of us recoil instinctively away from vicarious victimhood, against the notion of appropriating someone else’s very real suffering. We aren’t a collective of war children whose lives have been blighted forever.
It is there in my mind’s eye. I am seven and a half. My friend’s grandmother tells me, although she is more announcing it in anxious daze to herself and to the street, that there has ‘been a bomb’. I think that is interesting, but only just interesting enough to break the news to my mother half an hour after I get home and while playing with my cars on the kitchen floor. I learn new words and think they are everyday things. Blast. Cenotaph. Rubble. Condemned. Forgave. We get a day off school but we aren’t allowed to play football on the front lawn because of something called respect for the victims. Marie Wilson was twenty and I learn that twenty was actually still young. I grin at the cameras when they are briefly allowed to film in our church and only later have the fleeting feeling that I shouldn’t have. The leader of our Sunday school, Mr Armstrong, is no longer there. He has ‘died in the bomb’. Eventually the King’s Cross underground fire knocks our town off the news and I am slightly miffed.  
What blessed escape in the naivety and inanity of youth.
In the years after, Enniskillen continued to be a place of vibrancy and freedom, a place of safety and of opportunity and of harmony. Only now, 30 years later, do I realise that it isn’t by accident that my generation feel that urge to clarify what growing up in Enniskillen meant for us: the horror of the bomb didn’t define our childhood because many good people worked damn hard to ensure that it didn’t.
There were people like David Bolton, who shouldered so much of others’ grief through his counselling. There were the clergy in the Catholic Church who issued a directive of such clarity it should still be the touchstone today: “You must choose between good and evil.” There were the teachers in the High School who calmed bandaged children suffering from trauma in class while their headmaster lay in the coma from which he would never awake. There were people like Selwyn Johnston, who as a seventeen year-old stayed at the scene to pull bodies from the debris when others would understandably have fled, and later went on to lend so much of his zest for life in guiding the rebellious Boys’ Brigade group of my own teenage years. There were those who set up trusts to work on community cohesion, there were those like John Maxwell who conceived and created an integrated primary school, and of course there were the Wilsons, Gordon and Joan, about whom so much has already been written and yet still remains inadequate. Grace personified.    
That was leadership. It may not be the sort of leadership featured in a collection of 101 great speeches, or painted in battle scenes in far-flung lands, or celebrated in towering statues. It was the leadership of quiet and determined focus and re-focus on the right thing to do. It was leadership without fanfare or personal reward.
There were others for whom the absence of justice was and remains too much to accept. They played their part too, for they never sought to visit the same overwhelming grief upon another family’s door.
We will never know the counterfactual to that communal investment. We don’t know for sure what could have been, had these heroes not had the vision and courage to be a beacon for despair and a lightning rod for anger. We know that the hunger strikes and Paisley’s Third Force had managed to foment division here before the bomb. We know that the bomb was perhaps the most provocative gutting of one community in the entire Troubles. And we know despite that, somehow, Fermanagh largely escaped the murderous sectarian stranglehold that gripped other parts of this country in the years after it.
My belief is that these people, our people, saved a lot of lives. They deserve far more credit than they will ever receive or seek. They deserve, in particular, the gratitude of the generation who followed, who can remain very proud to say “I’m from Enniskillen”.