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6 days ago | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
This week I’ve been in Cambodia, a country that, though focused on the future, is trying to redress the balance between two distinct sides of its history: an ancient past that it is proud of and a recent one that it is haunted by. When you say you’re visiting South East Asia, generally people are excited for you. “That’ll be some experience,” they say with a congratulatory slap on the back, before jauntily reminding you to watch out for drink-spikers, card-skimmers and men dressed up like women.
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2 weeks ago | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
I have been sitting in this chair no longer than the time it takes to enter a password and open a blank document, but already I am getting it tight. Now, I know what you are thinking: ‘McElhatton’s lost it! Ha! Doubt he’d a touch of the Samsons about him, the baldy wee boor.’But to make such a comparison would be as wrong as it would be rude.
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3 weeks ago | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
AS far back as I can mind, I have seen a foretelling of my future reflected in the shining skulls of the men around me. With no shortage of hairless heads on either side of the family, I have long assumed, usually with a kind of c’est la vie shrug, that baldness was just part of my destiny.
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2 months ago | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
Just as there is no feeling more miserable than being housebound by sickness on a sunny day, neither is there any relief as resounding as waking up on the lazy side of the scratcher and hearing the heavens hammering hard upon the roof.
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Feb 1, 2025 | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
I used to look forward to the weekly ritual of sitting down to write my column, but, since the New Year, the whole process has felt a wee bit icky. For the last four weeks, you see, I’ve known something that most of you have not. And how would you, for god’s sake? Like the man who stole the mirror from McCann’s, I’ve been keeping quiet about it.
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Jan 27, 2025 | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
A TIMETABLE has been published ahead of the resumption of the Omagh Bombing Inquiry, detailing when the accounts of bereaved families will be considered. The public inquiry into the atrocity, which saw a Real IRA car bomb kill 29 people, including unborn twins, and three Donegal schoolboys in the county town in August 1998, will continue at the Strule Arts Centre Tomorrow (Tuesday). Its aim is to establish whether the attack could reasonably been prevented by security forces.
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Jan 26, 2025 | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
A RECENTLY retired teacher from Omagh County Primary School is raising money this month in memory of a former pupil who was killed in a road traffic collision back in 2018. Joan Clements is now three weeks into the Step Up for Air Ambulance challenge, which she is completing in remembrance of 21-year-old Kyra McKinley. The young Omagh woman, who passed away from injuries sustained in a two-vehicle crash on the Deverney Road back in 2018, was once a student of Mrs Clements.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
FARMERS from across Tyrone said their final goodbyes over the weekend to Jennifer Hawkes, a ‘universally respected’ member of the county’s agricultural community. The highly-regarded Omagh woman, who passed away peacefully on January 15 following a struggle with cancer, was laid to rest in the county town’s Dublin Road Cemetery on Saturday. Her funeral service, which was held in Omagh Methodist Church, was attended by a large congregation of family, friends, acquaintances and admirers.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
MORE than 30 years after eight men were murdered by the IRA on their way home from work, a memorial to the Teebane massacre continues to be periodically vandalised. No-one has ever been charged with the 1992 attack, which saw eight workmen killed by a 600lb roadside bomb shortly after their bus left Lisnelly British Army barracks in Omagh.
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Jan 18, 2025 | 
wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton
If you have ever wondered where exactly the boundaries of Errigal Ciaran begin and end, get in your car, take a drive through the parish and pay attention to the blue, white and yellow that is presently plastered all over the place. If the colours run dry, chances are you are no longer in Errigal. Following the local club’s nail-biting win over Dr Crokes at the weekend, the sprawling south Tyrone parish is now firmly in the grips of Errigal fever.
