IT has taken the village of Claudy, nine miles from Derry City in County Londonderry, more than 25 years to begin to come to terms with its role in the tragedy of Northern Ireland. The event that has left a permanent scar was on the morning of July 31, 1972.

Three blasts from car bombs created a death toll of nine out of a population of less than 500. Among the 31 injured, many never fully recovered. It took five years to repair the damage to the fabric of buildings and roads. Other tissue could never heal.

The village huddles over its wound. No investigation ever took place. No inquiry. No responsibility claimed. No apologies. No counselling for the families of the bereaved. No reparation. No communal expression of grief. Just bitterness, bewilderment, and a shared sense of futility and waste.

Even the death toll itself emphasised the misdirection of an atrocity that is still subject of local rumour and speculation. Perhaps inevitably in a mixed and successfully integrated community, the toll had an equity.

The dead numbered five Catholics and four Protestants. The statistic merely underlines how innocent were the lives that were lost. The youngest, Kathryn Eakin, was nine. They were random victims of a totally bungled operation.

''I would love to know why it happened,'' said Ms Philomena McLaughlin, whose mother, Rose, was one of the victims of the first blast on the main street of the village, and who died three days later in Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry.

''No-one has ever told us. When I vote Yes in Friday's referendum I will be hoping for a truth commission to come out of the agreement, which I have never even read, so that those who were responsible will stand up and say what happened. You hear ideas and rumours, and I am convinced it was locally instigated, but it was something you just had to learn to live with privately. I couldn't even talk about it until a year ago.''

For the McLaughlin family, Roman Catholics, the tragedy had lasting consequences. Eight children lost a livelihood and a support, in addition to their own mother, because the cafe which she ran was completely destroyed in the same blast. Ms McLaughlin, 18 at the time and the third oldest, was forced to sign on the following Monday. Her father, James, never worked again and went into a long decline before his death last year. The #5000 insurance compensation was insufficient to get the family business running again, even if there had been the will to do this.

Twelve years later, opening a small supermarket in the same premises as the cafe with a younger brother, Ms McLaughlin found the memories came flooding back. ''The first six months were terrible,'' she said. ''Stress and depression - it was very hard to overcome. I'm still not over it.''

It was last year that the private healing process coincided with an initiative that has been linked to the regeneration of the village of Claudy. Ms Patricia McLaughlin, who now lives in Limerick, began moves to organise a memorial service to mark the 25th anniversary of the bombing.

The idea was taken up by the Claudy Rural Development Association. Last July 31, a cross-denominational service was held in the open air of the village's former cow market, now a car park. It was a neutral ground that allowed the ministers and priests of the local Catholic, Presbyterian, and Church of Ireland congregations to join together in a joint service. The families of all nine victims were represented. It was the first time that they had met together.

From this, a privately organised victim support group has been launched and the village is preparing to raise funds through the CRDA for a memorial statue, a symbol of a community coming together, which has been designed by artists Maurice Harron and Elizabeth McLaughlin (no relation). It will show a female figure clutching her head and face in shock.

Significantly, this is just one of a series of important projects in a #1.4m development announced by the CRDA this month to bring a new community centre to the village. It will create 14 jobs, provide creche facilities, and an after-school group for children up to 12, and provide conference and advice facilities.

Elsewhere around the village, there are plans to plant trees along the same main street that suffered the worst of the bombings, to erect welcome signs on the four roads that lead into the village, and raise an income for the village through a hydro-electricity scheme at a converted mill development bought over by the CRDA.

The association's retiring chairman, Mr William Houston, is reluctant to accept that the entire impetus for the developments has come exclusively from last year's memorial service, but he agrees that the belated recognition of the scale of the tragedy in relation to the village has provided ''leverage''. A lot of promises made in the immediate aftermath of the bombings have been called in.

Mr Houston also acknowledges that he is slightly isolated in the Protestant community in identifying himself openly with the Yes campaign for Friday's referendum.

He reveals that he has taken ''some abuse'' from friends, but the clear impression among the folk in the bar of the Beaufort Hotel, a predominantly Protestant drinking place, is that the ''don't knows'' are preparing to vote Yes on the day.

Claudy is not a village which is likely to produce sharp divisions. The Beaufort Hotel was one of the three bombing targets on July 31, 1972, claiming three of the lives, and there is a recognition that the experience of shared grief had brought the village together over a long period before this was ever manifested collectively in last year's memorial service.

There is also a strongly-shared grievance that outside recognition of the tragedy was slow in materialising. Ironically, the memorial received much more sustained media attention because of its message of cross-community hope than the bombing itself.

That event was almost buried in the relentless litany of death and mutilation, with political backlashes, that marked the early part of 1972. Bloody Sunday had taken the lives of 13 men in Derry City on January 30. Direct rule from Westminster was imposed the following month.

A sniper killed the 100th soldier to die during the Troubles on July 18. Bloody Friday in Belfast left 11 dead and 130 injured from 26 bombs on July 21. And on the very morning of the Claudy bombings, Operation Motorman smashed into the ''no-go'' areas of Derry City and Belfast.

It has taken 26 years to argue the case successfully that a tragedy on a per-capita scale of Claudy would have accounted for the deaths of 4000 in Belfast and 1600 in Derry City. The impact on the community had not been fully appreciated.

Claudy's population has grown to 2500 over the period, though it is evident that it has become a commuter base for adults seeking employment in Derry City, Limavady, and Coleraine. This has threatened to create a vacuum in the soul of the village, which has a visibly deserted look during the day.

But life is returning dramatically. Its future depends on a Yes vote, and its history of mutual tolerance after suffering may yet establish it as a microcosm of the Northern Ireland many are now striving to build.