Would our family feel safer moving back to Mayo from Manchester?

Following Monday’s suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena, Irish Times Abroad put a call out to readers living there for their reaction. This piece from Tommy Leydon, who has been living in the city for 28 years, was among the responses we received.

Originally from Claremorris in Co Mayo, I, like tens of thousands before me from the county, left for Manchester in 1989. I am now a marine and civil engineer, working as a bid manager for an international engineering company here in the city. I am married to Geraldine, whose parents are from Co Kerry, for 18 years and we have two teenage daughters Eilíse and Aoife.

I saw a snippet of news on my phone before I went to bed on Monday - "Suspect device found in Manchester" - and duly ignored it as just another news channel over reaction to which would probably be nothing. I woke at 4.30am to the sound of the magpies fighting, and glanced at my phone again only to read the terrible news that a suicide bomb had gone off at the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena, which we later learned killed 22 people, many of them children the same age as my daughters or younger.

Both girls frequently attend shows, concerts and soccer matches in the city, and have been to the Manchester Arena on several occasions. I have often run up those same steps to collect them and their friends in that foyer where the blast went off. This Friday night, my wife and eldest were due to attend the Take That concert there.

How do you explain that news to two very in-tune teenagers? I was concerned about their reaction to this terrible tragedy. This could be a life-changing moment for them; what I was about to tell my daughters would change their perceptions forever.

By 7am I went into the eldest, who had already heard. She had received news that a friend who had been at the concert was not harmed. I was flabbergasted by her pragmatism, and her immediate assessment that Trump is turning people on each other, and this needed fixing.

She is in the middle of her GCSE examinations, but there has not been much study done in the past few days, as the bombardment of social media messages, dramatic stories both real and exaggerated, and images on television all took their toll on her.

Aoife, our 13-year-old, got worse news; an 11-year-old girl at her netball club was in hospital with a bolt embedded in her leg. Her operation was successful thankfully, and she is now complaining about the loss of her mobile phone. A mother widely known in the netball club tragically died as a result of injuries received in the blast.

Aoife has a school friend who was only slightly injured but her father has severe leg injuries. There were several other girls from the school who were at the concert but thankfully escaped unharmed, and are all back in class.

If my Eilíse wants to fix the world, Aoife is the worrier in the family - or so we thought - and I was very concerned about what impact the attack would have on a very thoughtful soul. When I arrived home on Tuesday however, she told me that school was in lock-down and they could not go to the school hockey field; she pragmatically informed me that there was less chance of being bombed in a field than in the school.

On reflection, there was almost an air of inevitability and expectation about another mass attack in the UK. Of late, the girls’ school trips to France and outings to the Christmas markets in Manchester had been cancelled. The question had become where and when, not if. The fact that it hadn’t happened thus far in Manchester had probably subconsciously reassured us all that the security services were on top of it.

The girls have often frustratingly asked while queuing to get through security at concerts, “could terrorists get us now?” We would respond with a cautious yes, followed by immediate attempts to reassure them that it wouldn’t happen to them, that the chances would be so slim. That changed this week.

The reality is, the terrorists could get you at a concert, on the tram, or in the Trafford Centre, where Manchester parents drop teenagers to hang out in the relative security of a well monitored and enclosed public space.

We have recently allowed our Eilíse to go into town for a few hours with her friends on their own. You can’t stop them if you want them to lead normal, free lives, but now as parents we’re wondering can we take the risk, because the consequences are unimaginable.

The ultimate conclusion arrived at by my girls and their mother is that they won’t get bombed in Claremorris. I doubt we will leave Manchester at this stage, it is very much our home, but there is satisfaction in knowing we have somewhere else to go.