An Irishman's Diary

John Moran's name leaped out at me from that morning's New York Times as I sat in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. It's not that it's an unusual name, but it is my name, and I was certainly not expecting to find it in the obituary column of a New York newspaper. The piece turned out to be a tribute to a fire chief who died at the World Trade Centre on September 11th.

John Moran liked playing the tin whistle and singing The Star of the County Down, according to the New York Times. It reported: "People may never forget the taunt that Michael Moran, John's younger brother and fellow firefighter, delivered to Osama bin Laden during a nationally televised concert in October, a taunt so profane and yet so eloquent, full of Irish anger and grief."

Looking at one's name written about in the past tense is unsettling. Visiting the stark site of the place where John Moran and thousands more died was immeasurably more so. It is now nothing but great mounds of rubble and rescue workers. It is a void, which seems frozen in horror and dread. A sense of anguish pervades it. It seemed to demand the funereal hush it received from the whispering crowds I saw there. Then there was the troubling smell from the smoke that wafted around the site and over the Hudson river.

In the nearby graveyard of Trinity Church on Broadway, where soldiers who died in the American War of Independence are buried, grey dust particles from the towers carpeted the grass and graves. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

A walk around the waterfront at nearby Battery Park helped, as the presence of the sea always does, to get a better perspective on things. The Battery area lies at the tip of Manhattan island and looks out to New York Harbour. It was the principal point of entry for emigrant ships that carried that most blighted generation of Irish people who arrived here at the time of the Famine, having watched in unimaginable horror as their friends and relatives died the most painful of slow deaths - the equivalent of a September 11th happening each and every week for six years. But after surviving the trauma of such biblical proportions, many Irish emigrants found sanctuary here.

In present-day Manhattan, though, it seems that the ongoing awfulness has yet to be fully defined - or worse, realised. "Strap-hangers" avoid the subway, fearing it will be targeted next. The "bridge and tunnel crowd" - a dismissive term Manhattanites use about people who come there from the other four boroughs, or worse, New Jersey - are now uncomfortable and fearful on their journeys in or out of Manhattan. Anthrax scares are commonplace and the fear surrounding it has developed into a plague of its own.

In these circumstances, it is only natural that people seek the comfort of solidarity and conformity. The star-spangled banner flies from cars, houses and workplaces. The latest fashions are so many variations on themes of red, white and blue. People were friendlier than I had remembered.

Street life is still the sweetest tonic in Manhattan - nowhere more so than in Times Square. , It's a bustling hive of humanity, where thousands of metro-gnomes explode up from the subway every few minutes into an already milling throng. But the place has softened a little since the last time I was here. Once a neon wilderness of hustlers, hookers and hoods, Times Square has been cleaned up by the city's outgoing mayor, Mr Hands-on, Can-do Rudi Giuliani - but not all of it, thankfully. One should always be allowed to enjoy an odd glimpse of the unseemly, if only as a corrective.

Coming up from the subway to the heady air of 42nd Street, it seems as if someone has pressed the fast-forward button of life and pumped up the volume. A torrent of all kinds of energy sluices along the fast-flowing past honking yellow taxis and steaming manholes. Huge mobile clothes-hangers are pushed past people handing out fliers, hawkers selling all sorts of knick-knacks and trinkets on the edge of the sidewalk. Being caught up in this hurly-burly, in the midst of all these wildly diverse people, allows natural sloths like me to feed off the effervescence. It makes my spirits fly.

Back in my hotel on a quiet Saturday morning after a night on the tiles in Greenwich Village, I switched on the TV to learn that overnight there had been a minor earthquake in Manhattan. The event had caused panic at its epicentre on the east side, not far away. At 1:42 a.m., low rumblings had been heard. Buildings began to move. Pictures fell from walls and objects crashed down from shelves. Frightened residents fled into the streets, fearing another attack.

But it was only an earth tremor.

Since then more grief has visited New York, when the American Airlines Airbus smashed into the Queens suburb of Rockaway, killing all 260 on board and five on the ground. This middle and working-class communities with strong Irish, Italian and Jewish flavours, was home to dozens of police officers, firefighters and others who perished on September 11th. Rockaway was also home to John Moran. His mother, Peggy, lives above his widow Kim and his children Ryan and Dylan. Brother Michael lives nearby.