[caption id="attachment_71291" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Denis Mulcahy at his Manhattan office. "]
In 1998 the Irish Echo put Denis Mulcahy on the front page of its St. Patrick's Day supplement as Man of the Year. He wore a patterned gold tie and a gray gabardine coat, his hands clasping a black protective mask, the Twin Towers looming behind him.
He was a detective first class with the New York City bomb squad and the interview dramatically ended with a bomb scare at the NYPD building in downtown Manhattan.
Much has changed since then. The World Trade Center is gone, and Mulcahy's dark
hair has turned silver. Retired from the NYPD, he is now with MSA Security, "an industry leader in high consequence threat protection."
But the charity that Mulcahy set up - the reason why he was Man of the Year - continues to do its work.
In 1975, Mulcahy founded Project Children, an organization dedicated to bringing children from Northern Ireland to the U.S. for six weeks over the summer. That first year, six children came out, three Catholics and three Protestants.
The project blossomed and over more than 35 years it has brought more than 21,000 kids to the United States for the summer. Many have forged long-term friendships with their American hosts. Some came back to America, going on to study at universities. Others have gained prominence in Ireland.
Project Children has earned the support of celebrities like Liam Neeson and Roma Downey. Beyond the Echo, there was wider recognition for Mulcahy: twice he was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize, and during the nineties he traveled as a guest of President Clinton to the North. (He jokes that Clinton was confused about his precise role because Mulcahy seemed on such familiar terms with his security detail).
At the time Mulcahy started the program, the Troubles were at their peak and he watched the 5 o'clock news every night in distress. So many of the reports about the North featured young people, he recalled - "on the streets there throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at the soldiers."
Kids were getting hit with rubber bullets, getting hurt and even killed.
Tensions that were always near the surface bubbled over during marching season.
"The Troubles, Mulcahy said, were really so bad and the segregation was so bad we were saying that if we get the young kids out of there for the summer - that was the marching season - they were not going to be on the street. They were not going to be out there and they were not going to be getting hurt."
William Crawley, a BBC journalist and broadcaster who took part in the program in 1978 when he was nine years old, remembers the freedom of that summer away.
"For six weeks I had an ordinary childhood," he told me over the phone from Philadelphia, where he was beginning an Eisenhower fellowship. "They gave me a bike from a garage and I went around the park with a little gang of boys on bikes."
Crawley stayed with a Catholic family in Monroe in upstate New York and shared a room with their son, Martin. He had grown up in what he described as "a pretty impoverished family" in a paramilitary-dominated part of North Belfast, an area that was controlled by the loyalist UVF. That summer in America was the first time he knowingly met Catholics. He gives his mother credit for allowing him to travel abroad and stay with a Catholic family.
The trip - Crawley called it an "intervention" - changed everything because it made him aware that many of the stereotypes about Catholics weren't true.
"I was made immune to much of the sectarianism in the area I grew up in," he explained.
"When conversations at school or in other places about what was happening in Northern Ireland came up, I was a different voice in the conversation because I had had these experiences."
Crawley went on to complete a Masters degree in theology at Princeton and hold posts as a Presbyterian minister in New York and Belfast before joining the BBC.
Another alumna of the program is Patricia MacBride, whose father and brother were both killed during the Troubles (her brother was an IRA volunteer), and who is now a Commissioner for Victims and Survivors of the Northern conflict.
But other children were less fortunate.
"We lost five kids to the Troubles who were out through the years and then went back and something happened," Mulcahy said.
"We've had some very sad stories and some great successful stories. You don't save everybody, but a lot of kids did very well out of it."
Mulcahy is from rural Cork and the hostilities in the North were initially distant and foreign to him. In the Republic of Ireland, by the seventies, Catholics and Protestants lived peacefully together.
"I was learning myself," he said. "Just because I grew up in Ireland didn't mean anything. It was like reading about another country."
Famously humble, when I asked Mulcahy about his role he brushed the question away, pointing to all the input of others behind the scenes. Women were responsible for much of the program's success: the mothers brave and open-minded enough to let their kids take off to another continent.
"In the early years families just wanted their kids out of there. It was mostly the women; the women didn't get the credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland like they should."
At his new workplace, close to City Hall in New York, Mulcahy sits in a large dark office where flickering screens with rolling news light up the room. Clients from all over the world send in images for the MSA experts to decipher. Something in a woman's purse could be a grenade, but in fact is a vial of perfume; a suspicious item containing wires turns out to be a novelty bottle of Snapple. Within seconds, Mulcahy and his colleagues respond, preventing multiple evacuations for their clients. Yet the job, he insists, isn't all that stressful.
In 1995, Mulcahy set up Project Interns in a partnership with the charity Habitat for Humanity. It allows college students from the North to receive valuable experience in the U.S. Before starting their internships, the students spend a week building houses in disadvantaged parts of the country. It was New Orleans a couple of years ago, and this year Tuscaloosa Alabama, which was hit by tornadoes in 2011.
"We're giving great internships where kids are getting incredible knowledge and are getting jobs out of it; plus they're giving back, working with Habitat for the week and building a house for a needy family," Mulcahy explained.
Everyone who helps with Project Children is a volunteer, but the rewards involved are rich. Last summer, one of Mulcahy's colleagues at MSA, Glenn Ostermann, played host to a Protestant girl and a Catholic boy. Ostermann is a Lutheran of German ancestry, and has no connection with Ireland, but he and his wife and children forged a relationship with the Irish kids and even brought them to their Lutheran church a few times. "When we took them to the airport, the last day, we were all upset. It was almost like we were one big family."
With funding coming from the likes of golf tournaments and raffles, the recent economic downturn has hit the project hard. So has the fact that the Northern conflict is much less in the news even though communal tensions continue, especially in parts of larger cities and towns.
Mulcahy is on the lookout for host families this July, ideally those with children of the same age; and for people who might have a spare room to house a college intern from mid-June to mid-August.
The need for the program is perhaps less urgent than it was, but that doesn't mean it has disappeared completely.
"You will always have segregation in Northern Ireland because of the way it is laid out," Mulcahy said.
"It's like southern Ireland, families don't move. They live, they grow up in a neighborhood, generation after generation."
