A woman who suffered horrific burns in the Omagh bombing has told how she was given only a 20% chance of survival and was administered the last rites four times in hospital following the explosion.
Donna-Marie McGillion, who was placed into a coma for more than six weeks, said she had believed there would not be a terrorist attack in the town in August 1998 as the Good Friday peace deal had been signed months earlier.
Ms McGillion had been due to get married a week after the Real IRA blast which devastated the centre of the Co Tyrone town.
She eventually married her partner Garry, who was also seriously injured in the explosion, the following year.
The Omagh Bombing Inquiry was told that Ms McGillion’s injuries were so severe that at first her family could only recognise her through her engagement ring.
The inquiry at the Strule Arts Centre is hearing personal statements from witnesses and people who were injured in the bombing.
The public inquiry was set up by the Government to examine whether the explosion, which killed 29 people including the mother of unborn twins, could have been prevented by the UK authorities.
The explosion occurred just months after the Good Friday Agreement had been signed.
On the day of the bombing, Ms McGillion had travelled into town with her partner, her partner’s sister and his niece Breda Devine.
They were shopping for shoes for 20-month-old Breda, who was to be flower girl at the wedding.
Ms McGillion told the inquiry that police had moved people to the lower part of the town due to a bomb alert in the afternoon.
She said: “We thought, we had had the Good Friday Agreement, a bomb was never going to go off in Omagh. It was only a (bomb) scare.
“We thought get in, get what we need and get out.
“Looking back on it now, it was a case of, we have the peace process, this is not going to happen, it has passed us now.
“When the (bomb) scare came we thought it was just somebody being silly.”
Ms McGillion said she has no memory of the explosion.
She was taken to Omagh hospital but later airlifted to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.
Ms McGillion said: “I had a 20% chance of survival when I landed at the Royal.”
She was placed in an induced coma for six-and-a-half weeks.
Counsel to the inquiry Paul Greaney KC read from Ms McGillion’s statement where she said she had received the last rites in hospital on four occasions.
Ms McGillion told the inquiry that she did not know what had happened to her when she was woken up.
She said: “I remember when they brought me round, my mum, who was my strength, and my dad and my two brothers were all around my bed.”
Ms McGillion said she believed she had been injured in a car accident but learnt about the Omagh bomb from a news bulletin on the radio.
Her statement said: “The trauma from my time in ICU and the burns unit will always haunt me.
“At times I still feel like I’m back on the ventilators which kept me alive and forced my lungs to breathe in and out.
“I was in extreme pain. It is very hard to explain, like getting burnt by an iron all over your body and multiplying it 200 times over.
“I couldn’t move or lift my hand, I couldn’t even move my face because of the pain. I guess my eyes had to tell others how I was feeling.”
She added: “I suffered 65% third degree burns to my face, upper body front and back, both arms, hands and lower leg.
“I suffered a large laceration to my forehead and shrapnel wounds. I also sustained lung damage and damage to my ear drum.
“After being discharged from hospital, for around three years after I had to wear a plastic mask on my face.
“I had so many different surgeries over the last 26 years that I have lost count.”
Ms McGillion said she still lives with daily pain and has had to become used to people staring at her facial scarring.
She said: “Sometimes I wish people would just ask, rather than stare. I don’t mind saying this is what happened.
“I would rather they ask rather than stare and wonder.”
Reflecting on the tragedy, she told the inquiry: “It is when you go into town and you see people, you know people have lost loved ones and people were injured, you see the pain and you see the hurt.
“It is a regular occurrence, it is there and it is never going away.”
Ms McGillion and partner Garry were eventually married in March of 1999.
She said it was a happy occasion, but that “one person was missing” because Breda had been killed in the explosion.
Ms McGillion said there had been a huge turnout of support from the community on her wedding day.
She said: “It was one of those moments when I was proud to be from Omagh, proud of the people around me.
“The realisation of the support and the network that was around and how everybody really did will for us and wanted us to make this a really good experience for us.”
