Never losing sight of New York's tragedy

Hope is the final casualty. People just handle it differently. Yesterday, at the memorial service for a missing husband and father, the family placed an empty coffin at the centre of the church ceremonies. It won't be the last.

"It's to make it real for the kids. It's a lie, but it seems more important now to help them come to terms with the fact that their Dad will not be coming back," said a friend of the family.

The 85th Street fire station has already buried two of its men, Capt Walter Hynes and Martin McWilliams. Of this small company, seven are missing.

By Thursday, Lieut Bob Disanza was reconciling himself to the inevitable. "It is said you can go 10 days without water but it's stretching it.

"This is the 10th day. This is the edge of life right here."

For others, the end of the line is the family centre at Pier 94.

As the rain lashed New York's canyons, a little straggle of trembling, red-eyed Colombians emerged from the vast open-plan building, one of them clutching a teddy bear.

"We believe every day that my father and brother will call," said a young woman in broken English. Her family nodded wanly. Then it emerged that among the issues they had just been discussing with counsellers was life insurance.

This barrier between heart and brain has been one of the most bewildering features of this past week in New York. What sustains this hope? "The police told us that there are places, air pockets, where people could live. Mr Giuliani said there is still hope," they explain.

Desperation leads to selective hearing. For at least a week, the mayor, among others, has been preparing the city for no survivors.

"The fact is that a lot of people were just vapourised or blown up or pulverised when the buildings collapsed", says a police source.

The pathetically few body parts now being recovered are not, as we imagine, fingers and bones and limbs but internal organs, such as lungs and liver.

Up close to the hellish, blackened 70 ft ruins of the twin towers, it is difficult to conceive of even a mouse emerging intact. This vast, malign, burial mound for up to 7,000 bodies is shrouded now in a rancid haze, a stench which some put down to decaying human remains.

Father Colm Campbell, whose missions before coming to New York nine years ago, included 12 years in Andersonstown ("I did think I'd put all this sort of thing behind me"), estimates that 1,000 of the dead could be Irish or be of Irish ancestry.

We may never know for sure. Stories abound of dozens of young Irishmen going to work high in the scaffolding of the twin towers on the morning of September 11th, most of them undocumented and working under assumed names. It is rumoured that three boys from a single Galway family have not been heard of since the disaster.

"There's bound to have been loads of immigrants in those buildings, working on the tea trolleys and as messengers, painters, repairmen," says Father Campbell, "but we're sensing a terrible reticence on the part of friends and families at home to give information. I've heard of three young Irishmen in hospital but who are there under different names."

It follows that such families are unlikely to apply for the DNA kits which the Irish Government is giving out to blood relatives to help establish identities but Father Campbell guarantees that real names can be given in "absolute confidence" if they contact him or New York-based organisations like the Emerald Information Immigrants Centre or Irish Radio Network.

The other priority is to establish a fund to help fly bodies back to Ireland. This can cost more than $6,000 plus the costs of the funeral. (Information at www.usairish.org).

Back at the epicentre, it is midweek and the emotionally charged, indomitable can-do air has blurred into a numbed orderliness. The mud-caked workers at the Red Cross feeding site admit to feeling tired and discouraged.

They have reached some of the areas below ground where hopes were invested and there is nothing to show for it. Fewer firefighters are trudging down to the scene to dig; there are too many funerals to go to, too many devastated families to console, too many extra shifts to be worked in their savagely depleted little units.

The painstaking sifting of the bucket brigades is giving way to heavy metal shifting. Even the ironworkers seem dispirited - those great unsung heroes of this excavation, who walked off highly-paid jobs to volunteer.

Soon, perhaps within days, the bulldozers will move in and with them the last gleam of a miracle will finally die.

It is said that 14,000 businesses are affected just in this part of the city.

Aidan Brady's is one of them.

The engine of an aircraft landed across from Brady's Tavern on Murray Street, within yards of the World Trade Centre, followed by the "confetti" that once seemed so vital to its occupants - a charred holiday request last Christmas in the name of Mike Howell; a company expenses claim; a blank cheque from Chinatrust Bank; a Port Authority memo confirming that an art work in the area was the same art work as was there last year.

In the blitz of ash, paper and debris, Brady had to be roped to the two policemen who escorted him to his car to prevent them being separated.

Born in Dundalk, he arrived in New York with his family at the age of seven. His spirit now is pure New York. He knows the pub won't open for business for weeks, maybe months, but the clean-up has to begin.

So he's out on the street trying to flag down refuse lorries, on the phone to an Armagh man at Con Edison to try to get power restored, arranging to meet his insurance company to assess his liabilities and work out ways to keep open the jobs of seven full time employees.

The New York spirit is evident all around the epicentre. In the streets directly behind and only yards from the epicentre, it's possible to believe that some minor construction is going on. The streets are clean and the telephone companies are replacing cables. But like everyone in the city, Aidan Brady knows that the full horror of the atrocity has yet to play itself out.

No one knows for sure who has been lost or which of his customers will never come through the door again.

Outside, elegant couples in breathing masks are being escorted for the first time back to their apartments.

"I was taking my eight-year-old daughter down to school that morning, she saw with her own eyes the plane crash into the second tower," says a tearful young mother. "How do you deal with that? Do I want to come back here?

"I really don't know. I'm only here to pick up some clothes. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid, afraid of so many, many things. I don't want to think of what lies ahead of us. Anti-aircraf t guns on rooftops? The FBI on every corner?

"I'm not sure that I like the idea of our troops sailing off to the strains of New York New York to fight some mercurial blob we say we're at war with. I still don't know who or where this blob is or even whether it's the right blob".

For those who believe that New York is the shoot-'em-up America of John Wayne and the good ol' boys, hers is a view that is repeated over and over across the city.

But then, as New-York based, Irish psychotherapist Tom Jackson puts it, "New York is not America, although as of Tuesday, September 11th, it is because the country sees the American firefighters, the American spirit here."

Some 62 countries have lost nationals in this calamity, a reflection of the vibrant diversity of the colours and cultures that populate every New York street, shop and subway.

No one can purport to be the primary victim or to have a monopoly on grief and that may explain why the hundreds of message on the walls outside Nino's restaurant on Canal Street near the disaster site or around the fences and steps of Union Square are overwhelmingly for peace and restraint.

Even police officers like Bill McDonald, standing outside Nino's, are hesitant.

"I'm scared, sure. Who knows what's going to happen? And I'm kinda torn about the way Bush is going. Of course we want somebody to pay for this but I hope we're smart enough not to start something that's going to hurt us even more.

"We've seen enough tragedy here. You can't classify anyone as the 'enemy' - Muslims are Americans too".

For all his opposition to Bush's politics, Tom Jackson's view is this is the time for unity.

"I've lived here for 15 years. I completely subscribe to the critique of American policy in many areas but right now that's not the point. I believe that America's heart is in the right place. Did you know that 1.5 million people lined up to give blood last week?"

His son's school has three parents missing since the attacks. (Two other schools are missing 100 between them). He knows that Arab-American pupils have been afraid to attend since the attacks so plans are in train for Tom Jackson and other to escort them to school in safety.

"It's a new paradigm. Everything is new now, everything is coloured by this. I think this new mood will last - this is only the beginning of what is going to happen".

Meanwhile back uptown, where New Yorkers are inching back to normal life, the pace seems more gentle and weary. There is less of the frenzied horn-sounding. It feels like a smaller, warmer, more compassionate city.

Crime dropped by 34 per cent in the week after the attacks. "I think even the bad guys were awed enough to stay home and watch television," says a laconic policeman.

The Stars and Stripes are wrapped around everything from shop window mannequins to the necks of Great Danes. Some shops display signs stating that 10 per cent of sales will be donated to victims' families.

One woman jokes that if she hears God Bless America one more time, she's emigrating to Iraq.

But few people care to laugh too loud in a city where it's impossible to move without catching a mosaic of the young faces of the missing or the fabulous flower displays that signify stricken fire stations.

Back at Lieut Disanza's station on 85th between Lexington and Third, queues are forming to write cheques for the Eng 22/Lad 13 Family Fund. The cheques are coming so fast and big that they've had to hire an accountant.

There are hugs and tears and tons of food for the lads who, as one New Yorker put it, were always considered the "hottest guys in New York" (with a calendar to prove it) and whose stock is at dizzying heights.

But they can never lose sight of their tragedy. Their closeness is legendary ("sick, actually", jokes a policewoman who is married to one) and they are truly stricken. One young firefighter, Kevin Cassidy, is happy to say that he got engaged while on a trip to Ireland with his girlfriend last summer.

Has he set a date?

"No," he says abruptly. "That's on hold. Indefinitely. And I mean indefinitely."

Telephone numbers. Fr Colm Campbell : New York 212 787 2506. The Emerald Information Immigrants Centre : New York 718 478 5502. Irish Radio Network : New York 212 935 0606.