Joe Duffy, Mary McAleese, Bertie Ahern and others share their memories of 9/11
Of Day Was Henny A Getty For Closed Images Following Abrams, Picture: Ray Ireland The Attacks 9/11 Sympathy
It was just after lunch and I had returned to my office in Áras an Uachtarain to meet the Indian Ambassador, who was shortly due to arrive. My colleague Grainne Mooney ran in past me in visible distress and switched on my television.
We both stood in shock taking in the live broadcast of that devastating scene caused when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Now a growing group of us were gathered watching and weeping silently at what we first thought was just a dreadful accident when the full horror of that evil event became clear with the appearance of the second plane.
We watched in stricken disbelief as it crashed into the South Tower. The Aide de Camp came in to say the Indian Ambassador was waiting. I had the sad job of breaking the awful, barely believable, news to him.
- Mary McAleese served as the eighth President of Ireland from 1997 to 2011.
I was in Washington DC that morning when a plane hit the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center. This apparent accident signalled a busy news day.
But at 9.03am when live television showed a second jet slam into the South Tower, I grabbed a taxi to Union Station, and headed for Manhattan. In traffic, the car radio announced the third crash – into the Pentagon. America was being attacked using aeroplanes full of innocent passengers.
The cabbie said all transport was grounded and left me to run back to RTÉ’s office. From the rooftop broadcast point, I saw thick smoke rising from the Pentagon. A fourth plane – headed to DC – crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered terrorist hijackers. Weeks earlier I’d first heard of Al Qaeda. I recall the silence, shock, and suspicion of that day. Tears came later, during a break in broadcasting.
- Carole Coleman was RTÉ Washington correspondent in 2001. She presents This Week on RTÉ Radio 1, 1pm Sundays.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001 dawned a beautiful day here in Ireland, a perfect day to paint our front wall. Taking a break from our task for a cuppa, we tuned into , but Joe Duffy’s voice sounded shaky as he announced that a hijacked plane had crashed into New York’s North Twin Tower, causing it to collapse.
We did not finish the wall that day. As we watched live TV coverage of the carnage and horror as the South Tower exploded, so many lives were lost, including the firemen who desperately tried to help. A cartoonist for the Galway Advertiser, two days later, in his efforts to portray this horror, illustrated a simple drawing of a plane heading for the South tower, with the caption “Daddy are we there yet”, for which afterwards he was berated for his insensitivity.
But they missed the point completely, he was referring to the youngest casualty, innocent two-year-old Christine Lee Hanson, whom for her at that moment, Tuesday was dawning — just another day of adventure.
- In 2014, Catherine Corless’ work as a historian helped expose the Tuam Babies scandal.
Liveline starts at 1.45pm, which is 8.45am New York time. The first plane hit the first tower at 8.46am.
Sky News was flashing “Breaking News from New York”, and the initial report was a small plane had crashed accidentally into the Twin Towers. By 2.03pm, our time, the second plane had crashed, and the producer on the day, Joan Tornsey, rang Niall O’Dowd of the Irish Voice in New York.
He said, “I’m looking across to Manhattan and there’s smoke coming from the Twin Towers…” All I remember then was a rollercoaster of people ringing in:“I’ve got relations in New York, what’s happening?” About 2.30pm, US-based journalist Marion McKeone told us a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I said, “Jesus, this is apocalyptic”.
I remember saying on air that night probably the only prescient thing I’ve ever said in my whole career: “I think today, September 11 th , will be remembered as a day that changed the world”.
The following Sunday, four of us headed to New York, and we couldn’t get into JFK, obviously, so we came in through Newark, and I remember, coming over the bridge into Manhattan, from New Jersey, you could still see smoke rising.
We did five programmes from Ground Zero, and every day there was someone Irish to talk to us. There were 349 firefighters who died on 9/11, and reading their names was like reading an Irish telephone directory.
- Joe Duffy presents Liveline on RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays 1.45pm.
I was in my classroom at St Gabriel’s School in Ballyfermot when Sister Carmel told us the news.
I knew that expression on Sister Carmel’s face. I remembered that expression from the year before, when Sister Carmel had broken the news to me that my mother had died.
I was 11 years of age and didn’t even know what the Twin Towers were. But I knew there was devastation in America.
There were conversations around the dinner table that night. As a child of 11, even hearing people saying the word ‘war’, you’re afraid: What is it going to mean for the world?
Whenever I think back to September 11, I think of the impact it had on people for generations to come. I think of the people and communities grieving over what happened that day, and of the people in Afghanistan and Iraq who have suffered as a result.
- Senator Eileen Ní Fhloinn is the first Traveller to serve in the Oireachtas.
I was studying in Pakistan when the 9/11 attacks occurred. I was shocked and horrified, as were my teachers and classmates, but from outside the seminary we heard news of celebrations, of people thinking this was some kind of victory for Muslims which somehow had avenged the Muslim lives lost in American misadventures throughout the last century.
I knew that was wrong from a religious point of view - the Quran says that taking one life is like taking the life of all humanity - and now we can all see how wrong it was even from a geopolitical point of view.
The innocent lives lost that day were soon joined by many more innocent lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The lived experience of Muslims throughout the world changed that day, with airport profiling, Islamophobia and racism becoming justified in the eyes of some.
I’m reminded of the Eric Bogle song [Green Fields of France] on the futility of war and violence, “It all happened again and again and again.” The cycle of violence continued directly and indirectly to the rise of ISIS, civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and at times it looks like it will never end.
I am extremely grateful that my family and I, and my wider community, are largely sheltered here in Ireland from these trends.
- Shaykh Dr Umar Al-Qadri is chairman of the Irish Muslim Peace & Integration Council.
I was on Mykonos with my future husband and we had just come back from a day on the beach when he got a text from a friend that read: TWIN TOWERS ATTACKED. Almost at the same time, we could hear the lone American who was staying in the thin-walled pensione next door exclaiming “Oh my God! Oh my God!” We could hear a television in the background. We didn’t have one in our budget accommodation.
After a phone call to our friend to clarify what was happening, we ran down the beach to one of the big hotels. A crowd was gathered around the large screen. They suddenly cheered, and as we fought our way closer to the screen, we realised they were watching Panathinaikos play some other football club.
We begged the manager to let us watch the news channel during the interval, and he reluctantly relented. It made us realise how American-centred Ireland and the UK are, perhaps because of the common language. For the Greeks, it was like an atrocity that we might hear of in Indonesia.
For us, we expected World War III.
- Liz Nugent’s , is in bookshops now.
Somewhere between 9.05 and 9.20am that morning I was walking to work, to my hotel on Lexington Avenue, and I remember Donna, my PA at the time, calling me and saying “Are you okay?”. I had no idea, because I was out on the street.
Within minutes, I was in the hotel, and people were sitting in silence watching the TV in the bar. It was surreal, to be in New York and seeing the burning building on TV, and to be able to go out the door and see the smoke in the far distance.
As the morning unfolded, I could see thousands of people coming up Lexington Avenue, walking by, they all took a right turn on 59th Street, they were getting out of the city, walking over the 59th Street Bridge, because there were no cabs, no subways.
As the day went on, we became known as the unofficial Irish consulate, as people in Ireland were ringing, saying “My daughter is in New York, I can’t reach her, but I know she’ll go to you”. People in New York were messaging us too, expecting their families to get in touch.
We were taking down names and passing on messages. By the end of the day, we had thousands of messages.
All this time on, we all thought nothing could be worse than 9/11, but nobody knew that Covid would come. I’m not underestimating the loss of life in 9/11, of course, but nobody knew Covid would go on this long, or the loss of life that’s come with it. I went around the city a week into lockdown, and it was horrific. Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, totally deserted.
With 9/11, it happened, and then you had to try and get over it, but with Covid, we had no idea when it was going to end, but hopefully, we’re on the right road now.
- John Fitzpatrick owns the Fitzpatrick Manhattan and the Fitzpatrick Grand Central in New York.
I was coming to the end of a meeting with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in my office, one of our many meetings trying to get the institutions up and running in the North, when my private secretary, David Feeney, came in to say there had been a tragedy in the States and it looked as if a plane had gone into one of the towers.
My next meeting was to discuss Northern Ireland with US Envoy Richard Haas, and I told him the news. There weren’t as many mobiles then, so he hadn’t heard. We assumed at this stage that it was an accident. We weren’t long into the meeting when David Feeney came in again to say a second plane had gone into the second tower.
All hell broke loose. Haas tried to ring his office immediately. His contact point was in the State Department, but he got no answer. Then he tried a hotline number in the Pentagon, and there was no answer at that. He looked visibly shocked. We learned later that the Pentagon had at this stage been evacuated. Eventually, he got through to somebody somewhere else.
There I am, sitting with the US president’s envoy, getting first-hand what’s going on over in the States, when he finally did get through. At that stage they thought it could be the Palestinians. Brian Cowen was Foreign Minister, and at that minute he was meeting President Arafat. I rang Cowen from the office. Haas was saying Arafat would need to get out, disassociating themselves from it. Haas was talking to me, I was relaying it to Brian, Brian was relaying it to Arafat.
After our long meeting, we went out to the press conference, and we had quite large press conferences at the time because the Northern Peace Process was going through its various shades of problems, but all the press guys knew that Haas was with me, so the usual 20 or 30 journalists became about 100.
Haas came out in front of Government Buildings and addressed the journalists, took questions from them, left them the preliminary information that he had from his colleagues in the State Department.
The rest of the day was utter chaos.
Mary Harney and I decided to have a day of sympathy and close down the country [that Friday]. We were the only country, I think, that did so.
I went out to the Clonskeagh mosque, because there’d been a bit of an outcry against the poor Muslim people, and I met our Muslim sisters and brothers, and they really appreciated that. It was one of the things that I did that was probably most appreciated down the years, because they really thought it was kind not to be showing any malice or blame to them.
- Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach from 1997 to 2008.
As part of my job, I often ask people about their earliest memories, which usually leads me to reflect on my own. I’ve come to decide that I have two. One is a vague memory of walking down the staircase in the first house I lived in in the US. The other being a little hazier, more of a memory of a feeling than a particular vision.
Like everyone else, the morning of September 11, 2001, was a usual one in our small house in the suburbs of Rhode Island. My father got up to open our pub (Irish-themed of course) while my mother got me ready for school and headed off to work in the local nursing home.
These parts — the mundane — I don’t remember. I was only five years old. What I do remember is the line of children at the door. Our little Kindergarten class stood there, clad in plaid pinafores and shiny new black shoes, as our teacher ushered us into formation to be collected by our parents.
We were quieter than a usual group of infants might be. Clueless, but aware something was going on. Something important enough for us to keep our heads down.
The only other part of the day that I remember was watching my mother in the kitchen after we got home. I sat on a stool by the counter, perplexed by her focus on the TV. She was standing at the other side of the room, staring at the little screen with her hands on her face.
Of course, 20 years later I now know what she was watching. She heard the news while at work, and watched along with her fellow staff members as they gathered around a small television in the reception area. After the second plane hit, she and her administrative colleagues were told they could go. She rang my school on her way to the car and came straight to collect me. It was all she could focus on as people whirled around her.
Chaos is the only word she uses to describe it now. She really thought the world was ending.
My father hadn't yet left for work when the news came in. He sat alone in the house with the TV on in shock. Later in the day, he decided to go ahead and open the pub, more so that people could gather and talk than drink. Prior to the pandemic last year, it was the only time in 32 years he considered shutting the building down.
Our regulars came and sat together, watching the news and mourning. Many of our bartenders and friends were local firefighters. The main thing he remembers is that the images coming through were unfiltered. It was a somber day, he says. Every other restaurant and pub in the area he knows of stayed closed.
The traffic was crazy, tensions were high, and the phone didn’t stop ringing as worried family members at home in Ireland called to check in.
They both remember it all when asked for details, but the first thing they always mention is panic. Even though they were emigrants from West Cork and Rhode Island is three hours from New York City, it was on their doorstep, they say. My mother’s cousin was meant to be in the Towers that day. The flights came from the airport we fly through to get home.
We don’t talk about it very often. My mother and I moved home to Ireland three years later, and my American stepmom finds the topic hard to discuss.
But we think about it. I see it in my dad every time he watches me join the queue for security at Logan Airport. I’ve seen it in my mother the few times she’s stepped on an airplane since, her fear of flying now so strong she keeps her head in a pillow during take off. I see it with every friend and family member we have in the US: the anger, the fear, the divides.
Even though I don’t recall much from the day, I still feel it too: that gut-swirling sense that, in a very small way, you experienced the worst kind of history. Something so large no one will ever be able to really comprehend it — no matter how vivid their memories are.
- Martha is a journalist with the Irish Examiner