OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Memory and Reflection

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

For the families of the dead, moving on may yet be impossible. More than 3,000 people were died horribly in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Southwestern Pennsylvania. Countless lives were changed, in ways as unimaginable as the attacks themselves. And it all happened on a clear, cloudless September morning.
Those who were living and working in New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11 often recall that incongruously beautiful day. It returns, less as a memory, more as a recurring nightmare: out of such a fine morning came devastation.
“I came out of my house in Riverdale the other Saturday morning,” said Mike Phelan, a union organizer, speaking of his memories of Sept 11. “And I said, Wow, this is just like the weather on Sept. 11th, fine, clear, cloudless, not too hot, not humid. It disturbed me.”
“I don’t think anyone can put it behind them,” said Anne Marie Scanlon, executive director of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in Woodside, Queens. “For months after I didn’t want to take the subway in case of another attack there.”
Terry Golway, an Irish-American journalist with the New York Observer, also found something as basic as his daily ride to work had changed: “I take a much longer commute [from New Jersey],” Golway said. “The horror of that day and what it represents for the future has not receded.”
A year later, and Janet Stewart, whose brother Michael was killed in the north tower, has barely started to put the loss behind her, marred as it was by a dispute over her brother’s remains.
Michael, 42, was born in Belfast. He immigrated to the United States in 1981 and was employed in banking and finance over the years, most recently with Carr Futures on the 92nd floor of 1 World Trade Center.
“The world has changed. None of us can take our personal safety for granted,” she said. “It is a different thing [than terrorism in Northern Ireland]. The sheer scale of it is something else. And of course, Michael is very much in our thoughts all the time.”
Michael’s remains were found in March 2002.
Burying their dead allowed some families a measure of closure. But, Janet Stewart continued, the constant media bombardment of news and issues associated with Sept. 11 make it impossible for a day to pass without thinking of the tragedy.
She was echoed by Chris Byrne, a former New York police officer and Irish-American musician.
“On a good day,” he said, “you might go four hours without thinking about it. Some days, it’s 10 minutes after you wake up — it could be CNN or New York 1. Or seeing a kid whose father didn’t make it out, when I go down the street to the deli for a coffee.”
Byrne lives in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood with many firefighters, police officers and civilians who were caught up in the tragedy.
Golway suggested that for the fire and police departments, it was an “outer borough and suburban tragedy that happened in Manhattan. Staten Island, Brooklyn, New Jersey, suffered; Staten Island suffered the worst. Thirty people were killed from one parish alone, St Clare’s.”
He reckoned that perhaps Manhattan, by its very nature, has remained “less changed” — because it changes fast anyway.
Said Chris Byrne: “It has receded at least in terms of corporate American, which has said, ‘We’d better get on with the show.’ “
But he affirmed that the hurt is strong in New York’s outer borough communities. For months after the attacks, his 7-year-old son drew pictures of the towers on fire, with people leaping from them.
“In the communities where I live and work there is a greater sense of community. In my parish, the local community dance attracts five, six hundred people. They got triple this year.”
The dance commemorated Kevin Conroy, an employee of Marsh and McLennan, the insurance brokerage company that occupied seven upper floors at 1 World Trade Center.
On a website set up to remember the victims, Conroy’s son Matthew wrote: “I love you dad and I will always miss you and treasure the way you were always there for me.”

The mind rewinds
Commemorations, memorial services, wakes, benefits and fundraisers — the events that communities use, not least the Irish community, to try to heal have happened in abundance.
But how often do minds rewind and play back the morning of Sept. 11? “I was in the subway;” “I had just gotten into work;” “It was my day off;” “It was my first day back to work after 10 days in Ireland;” “My initial reaction was to get the kids from school;” “I was on the phone to someone in Dublin and they said, ‘Have you seen what’s happening?’ “
At the Vesey Street site of what would become the Irish Hunger Memorial, artist Brian Tolle was laughing with his coworkers about two drivers fighting over a minor fender-bender next to his work site. They were a block from the World Trade Center.
“A Porsche had collided with a yellow cab, and the drivers were arguing.”
Then the first plane came down Manhattan, slamming into the north tower at 8:47 a.m. Tolle told the Echo: “We knew it wasn’t an accident even then. I had a feeling. The plane seemed to accelerate at the last minute.”
Paul Beckett, a Wall Street Journal reporter with an office by the World Trade Center, saw people jumping from the towers.
Byrne remembered the vast cloud of smoke and dust after the collapse: “It was like a corridor, blowing all the way down to Coney Island. Kids were picking papers off the streets. My son kept asking me about the Empire State Building, that they hadn’t got that one.”
After watching the second tower crumble, John Fiddler, a Dubliner living in New York, went to work. He is a senior nurse at the New York Presbyterian Hospital on the Upper East Side, with the hospital’s burn unit. It is the premier burn unit on the East Coast.
“I knew when I saw [the towers] burning that I would be needed,” he recalled. “We moved all the non-critical cases, except for one young boy. By noon, only seven of the 22 beds had been filled. At about 5 o’clock I got my first patient. She was burned on the front of her body, stomach, arms, legs. She was on one of the floors just below where the plane hit and she had been hit by the explosion.”
Of his patient’s resolve, he noted with awe in his voice: “She made it down 80 flights of stairs with her friends’ help.” But, he added, “she lasted about a week.”
At what quickly became known as Ground Zero, Roger Smyth, a paramedic originally from Belfast, was part of the desperate scrabble to find survivors. There were few.
On Staten Island, former cop Byrne had reported as a volunteer at a hastily constructed morgue.
“When no bodies arrived by midnight, we started to realize that there would be no bodies,” he said.

“Bonds of kinship’
At Ground Zero, the grim search for survivors soon turned to a recovery mission. Elsewhere, a search of a different nature started as well, a search for information.
From Dublin where he now works and lives, the Irish Consulate’s then press secretary, Eamonn McKee, remembered the hours and days after the attacks as “one long tunnel of activity.”
He was a key part of the Consulate’s work after 9/11, gathering information, helping bereaved families with Irish ties, and attempting to establish how many Irish people had died in the attacks.
When a phone connection was finally established with Dublin, the Consulate kept the line open all day and all evening.
“We had to see how many Irish and Irish Americans were caught up in this,” he recalled. “We had to filter information and see who was missing.”
As the days went by, many people on the initial list of missing were tracked down. But a few names remained on the list. Families needed counseling and information. The Consulate was kept open 24 hours a day.
McKee remembered: “It became clear that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to make the distinction between who is Irish and who is Irish American. The connections are very intermixed.”
With the perspective of a year, he said that he believed that Sept. 11 had ultimately brought Ireland and America closer together.
“On a personal level, this reinforced the bonds of kinship between Ireland and America,” he said. But, he added, there were times when he realized that his American-born wife had “an emotional response much deeper than mine. I could only try to understand that deeper level when I thought how I might have felt if terrorists had flown planes into Liberty Hall in Dublin.”

A view from the outside
One year later, and, though still affected by the horror of Sept. 11, many people have realized that their responses since then vary widely.
Opinions differ as to the aftermath and how the world has changed — and the Irish and Irish American communities reflect this, in New York and beyond.
Ireland was the only country to declare a national day of mourning in the aftermath of 9/11. Since then, strong views have been expressed about everything from how the Irish and Irish Americans perceive each other to how the U.S. has responded to the attacks.
Some called the tragedy a uniquely Irish one, because so many of the firefighters, workers and police officers had Irish connections.
Anne Marie Scanlon rejected the idea that one could even speak of an “Irish dimension” to the tragedy.
“I was almost offended by journalists asking about how this had affected the Irish community in New York,” she said. “It’s no different from any other community. We are all equally affected.”
Scanlon had only recently become a U.S. citizen. Did she feel more American?
“I felt more a New Yorker than ever,” she said. “I live here, this is my home.”
Home seems farther away than ever for Noreen Bowden, a New Yorker and first-generation Irish American who lives in Galway.
Since Sept. 11, she has spoken of a palpable anti-Americanism in Ireland. “Very early on, two or three days after the attacks, a woman was writing in one of the papers in Ireland,” Bowden recalled. “And she said that her first thought after the attacks was ‘America is going to be far more dangerous in the world after this.’ And then her second thought was, ‘Oh my God, those poor people.’ That just enraged me.”
“The outpouring of grief really impressed me, especially at the day of mourning,” she continued.
But it did not last. On St Patrick’s Day in Mulligan’s in Dublin, a woman swore at her, and told her that “America had it coming,” she said.
“Many people are genuinely sympathetic. But I felt more American. It separated me from the people in Ireland. There was all this talk in the Irish and European media that ‘America should ask why this happened.’ All of a sudden, anti-Americanism started to scare me. It seemed trivial before. Suddenly it had power. Suddenly, with Sept. 11, it could kill.”
John Fiddler, the burns unit nurse who treated patients from the World Trade Center for months after Sept. 11, raises exactly the attitudes Bowden found exasperating. He became a U.S. citizen several years ago.
“I feel more Irish than ever before,” he said. “I remember a teacher I had in Ireland said that guerilla warfare and terrorism will always win. You can’t fight it with conventional military weapons and with bombing. [Sept. 11] has made me angrier. People have to think more. I feel people don’t get it in America, they don’t seem to understand the whole rest of the world’s response. When the rest of the world has an opposing opinion, as they mostly do with regard to invading Iraq, shouldn’t you stop and think? One thing I learned from Sept. 11 is that you can never be sure of anything from one day to the next, and also, that you can be wrong.”
He emphasized the word “wrong.” “That is something that Bush and his administration have yet to learn,” he said.
Scanlon in Woodside said that while she may not agree with some of the opinions expressed in Ireland, “it’s a democracy, and people can say what they want. We as a people in general are very emotive. Look at the day of mourning, for example.”
“It certainly doesn’t feel like a year,” said Janet Stewart, speaking on the telephone from Northern Ireland. “I had literally just moved into a brand new house with my partner.”
She still cannot take in what happened.
“There is a profound sense of disbelief,” she said. “I think of Michael, and how he will never get to see his sons grow up, or see what they will make of their lives. He wasn’t sick; he was in the prime of his life.”
Stewart said that on Sept. 11th she and her mother and other family members would attend a memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
“My mother is shell-shocked, though she carries on. But she is very much at sea, very lost. She gets upset very easily.”
Noreen Bowden is still living in Galway, but said that she would return to the U.S. permanently one day.
Of the opinions he heard in Ireland opposed to American military actions after Sept. 11, Chris Byrne said: “I didn’t like those people in the first place. I was in Ireland a month after the 11th, and the intellectuals concerned about the suffering of Afghani children seemed rather silent about the children of Holy Cross [school in Belfast.]”
For both America and Ireland, Byrne added, one small but significant good outcome of Sept. 11 was how it allowed outsiders to suddenly see a New York they had never seen before, “a New Yorker they didn’t know existed, not the ‘Sex in the City’ or the Woody Allen New Yorker. They saw working stiffs, blue collar people, the 90 percent who make this city work.”

Moving on
One year later, and many people remain sad and angry. Others have moved on. Some turned to God and their faith, became more spiritual and rediscovered their church. Others looked at the burning towers and could see no evidence of God.
Scanlon remembers being overcome by people’s generosity in the days after the attacks.
Many have seen goodness triumph — as John Fiddler put it: “When bad things happen, the good thing that comes out is the human spirit.”
“I am really proud of what we did in our burns unit,” he said. “We fought and won lives over six months after the tragedy. Of 18 patients, about seven or eight did not make over the next three, four months.”
He continued: “I am really proud of our work. Speaking as a citizen of America and of Ireland also. I am Irish and I helped with the recovery of this city.”
But few have been able to escape the nightmare images of the day. Looking back, Scanlon said, “especially being Irish, you don’t think anything bad can happen when the sun is shining.”

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