One man's dogged search for justice

On a mission: Gerard McSorley plays bereaved father Michael Gallagher in Omagh

Having been born and raised in Omagh in Northern Ireland, Gerard McSorley was a logical casting choice for a film set in and named for the small market town in County Tyrone.

The modest, down-to-earth 55-year-old plays the central role of Michael Gallagher in Omagh, the searing Channel 4 docudrama that revisits the 1998 car bombing in which 31 died and more than 200 were injured.

Gallagher, an unassuming and private man who ran a small car-repair business with his 21-year-old son Aiden, became the unlikely public face of the campaign for justice after the August 15 bombing. Backed by fellow members of the Omagh Support and Self-Help Group, he single-mindedly dogged officials who were driven by political expediency. He demanded simple answers to plain questions while a sluggish and inept investigation and an apparent official cover-up sought to limit the effects of the bombing on the peace process which was then only six months old.

McSorley says that Omagh had been, until that day, untouched by the Troubles, a place where Protestants and Catholics had always got on well.

"So this act came as a huge shock to everybody. It's a town of maybe 30,000 but the centre is very small and that bomb mutilated the place, ripped the heart out of it and very few people go shopping there now."

The long-time Dublin resident says that he "knew no one directly - thank God - who died in the bombing", which was the work of the so-called Real IRA, a renegade group determined to derail the peace negotiations between Sinn Fein and the British Government.

But he had more than a home-town in common with the man he played: McSorley shared with Gallagher the pain of being a bereaved father, having lost his son in an unrelated incident barely two months after the bombing.

In Michael Gallagher's case, at least at first, "lost" is not a euphemism: for long, agonising screen minutes, McSorley's Gallagher literally can't find Aiden.

As the victims of the carnage are hauled into the local hospital, he darts from stretcher to stretcher, searching for the lad. It's the heart of an emotionally potent sequence that seems shot on the fly but which is, like all the best docudrama, meticulously scripted.

And it showcases the skill that McSorley, a former member of Dublin's Abbey Theatre company and a veteran of British television, makes almost invisible in an understated but tour-de-force performance.

McSorley says he wanted to offer something more than an imitation of the real Gallagher.

"I watched everything that was available of him in terms of television clips," he says, "and I met him and his wife, but I did my best to not imitate him because I don't think that would have been a service to the film. It would have been mimicry.

"I wanted to create something that was distinctive. For example, I don't physically resemble him: I have no hair, as you know and Michael Gallagher has a big shock of white hair but I deliberately took the decision not to wear a wig."

What's striking about the acted Gallagher is his intense quietness. And McSorley says that's part of the essence of the real one.

"That's what he's like. He's a very effective leader but there's no bombast or arrogance about him. He never raises his voice and that's why he's so powerful. He is able to say to politicians who are being eloquent and articulate things like: 'Are you sure that you are right about that?' and his quietness is a devastating embarrassment to people in authority who could not and have still not delivered satisfactory answers."

Omagh caused a sensation when it screened in Britain. In the same way as Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough (about the Sheffield football stadium disaster) or Paul Greengrass' Bloody Sunday (about the massacre of unarmed protesters by British troops in Derry) both of which it resembles in style, it raises questions that are still unanswered.

McSorley politely avoids detailed discussion of the politics of the issue which he describes as "murky, dark complex and unconcluded". But he makes the point that the film, made for Channel 4 by a London production company, paid due respect to the provenance of the story: the crew and all 65 actors were Irish.

Drained by the experience of making and passionately promoting Omagh, McSorley had resolved to retire from acting until a call came from Martin Scorsese with a role in The Departed, the director's Boston-set remake of the Hong Kong police drama Infernal Affairs.

He was told to "be in New York in a week", he said, but the association ended almost as suddenly as it began. For reasons still unclear to him "I found myself back on a plane and the contract was terminated".

He describes it now as "a confusing episode which I'd rather not repeat" but he says it has given him a new lease of life.

Right now he's in Donegal in the republic's far northwest, making a television series in the Irish language, which, though he doesn't speak it fluently, he's mastering with the help of a dialogue coach.

"It's a very wild part of the country, mountains and bogland, and it's beautiful, so it is," he says down the crackling phone line, and rhapsodises about the dusk.

"I'm doing something I've never done and I'm in an absolutely beautiful part of the world. Maybe I won't retire just yet."

What: Omagh
When and where: Screening now at Rialto Cinemas