EXPATRIATES' LOSS:Between the dead in the collapsed towers and those trying to rescue them, Irish-America was impacted like perhaps no other ethnic group
CITIZENS FROM more than 90 countries were killed in the attacks of 9/11. In that way and others, it was, as the Irish writer Colum McCann has said, the first universal event of the 21st century. Yet within that global network of outrage and grief, New York’s Irish and Irish-American community paid an especially high price.
The Irish Consulate General knows of seven Irish-born citizens who died in the World Trade Center: Jeremy Carrington from the North, and Martin Coughlan, Joanne Cregan, Patrick Currivan, Kieran Gorman, Ruth McCourt and John Moran from the Republic. Ireland was the only foreign country to declare a national day of mourning. “It was greatly appreciated, an unqualified outpouring of ‘We are with you. We feel your pain,’” says Consul General Noel Kilkenny.
Other US cities show signs of 9/11 fatigue, but in New York the memory is still raw. “No one was left untouched,” says Brendan Fay, a film maker and gay rights activist from Drogheda who organises the St Patrick’s for All Parade in Queens.
“It was a huge assault on a very prominent landmark,” says James O’Malley, the head of a New York law firm who immigrated from Dublin. “The Twin Towers were an icon we all related to . . . Closure is a funny word. I never know how to deal with it.”
Ireland is intimately woven into the fabric of New York. Areas of Queens and the north Bronx give the impression that pieces of Ireland broke off and floated across the Atlantic. Shops in Yonkers sell Tayto crisps and Barry’s tea. Irish-Americans such as New York congressman Peter King and Fr Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York fire department (FDNY) who died on 9/11, were such ardent supporters of the IRA that one Irish-born New Yorker wonders whether they’d have had a different attitude if 9/11 had occurred before the Belfast Agreement.
Bill Baroni, the deputy director of the Port Authority who showed me around the World Trade Center construction site, said New York was built by people like his grandmother from Clare. Many of the workers who raised the original Twin Towers were of Irish heritage. So were hundreds of the stockbrokers, bankers, firemen and police who died there on 9/11. Today, the Irish participate in the Center’s reconstruction not only as labourers, but by manufacturing hi-tech computer equipment for Irish-based US contractors.
New York politics too are permeated with Irishness. The city has had 11 mayors of Irish origin, three of whom were born in Ireland. The Irish-American City Council speaker Christine Quinn is leading opinion polls and fundraising for the 2013 mayoral election. “Although we’ve put an entire decade between us and one of the darkest days for our nation, we carry with us the memory of those lost,” Quinn says.
“The events of that day forever changed us, but they also united New Yorkers.”
New York’s police commissioner Ray Kelly is the grandson of immigrants from Cavan and Longford. The grand marshal of the St Patrick’s Day parade in 2010, Kelly holds more power than any previous police chief, because of measures adopted to prevent a recurrence of 9/11.
When the airliners hit the towers, hundreds of Irish- Americans working at brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald tried to run down the stairs, while Irish- Americans from fire and police departments ran up.
“It sort of sums up the Irish-American experience,” Commissioner Kelly told NBC. “The financial services industry has been a vehicle for the Irish as they do well in this country. The two forces met on the staircase. Police officers and fire fighters going up, responding to the emergency, and the Irish- Americans, among others of course, leaving, escaping the danger as best they could.”
Peter King, the son of a New York cop, chairs the Friends of Ireland in the US House of Representatives. “The Irish community was hit hardest in the police and fire department, but also in the financial community,” King says. Three-quarters of the staff of Cantor Fitzgerald – 658 people – perished in the World Trade Center. “For whatever reason, [the firm] became a real haven for Irish Catholics,” King continues. “The largest number were working-class Irish Catholics who had gone to small colleges. Most were in their 30s and 40s and had become very successful. They used to do fundraising events for me in lower Manhattan. Almost every one of them was killed on 9/11.”
King says the Irish community was “historically equipped to deal with death and tragedy” but the impact was nonetheless devastating. “You had the wakes. You had the funerals. It was sad. It was horrible. There were bagpipers at all the police and fire department funerals.”
Billy Nolan, the Dublin-born president of the fire department’s Emerald Society, says more than 7,000 of the department’s approximately 11,000 firefighters are of Irish origin. “The Irish had a tough time getting work,” explains Denis McCool, the captain of engine company 92 in the Bronx, whose parents came from Donegal and Galway. “They just gravitated to the fire department. Dads brought their sons and brothers. The culture of the FDNY became Irish.”
The fire department lost 343 men at the World Trade Center. Three-quarters of those fatalities – 254 men – were Irish-American members of the Emerald Society. In the rubble of the Twin Towers, rescue workers reportedly found many Claddagh rings, the clasped hands and heart symbolising friendship, loyalty and love. The New York police department lost 23 men, the Port Authority police 37. One of the latter, Liam Callaghan from the Port Authority, had been a groomsman at Billy Nolan’s wedding.
Nolan and McCool arrived after the towers collapsed, to search through the rubble. In the chaos of 9/11, McCool ran into his friend Michael Meehan, a police officer from a Donegal family of nine. Eugene and Kevin, two brothers who are firefighters, were fine, Meehan told McCool, but they couldn’t find Damien, who worked for Carr Futures.
“At Damien’s funeral, Mr Meehan said ‘We are so lucky to be able to bring Damien home to bury him’,” McCool recalls. “All the time I was down there, I never removed an intact person – just parts. It was a horror movie. One day I found a woman’s hand with her wedding ring on it. You just hope the act of bringing that hand gave someone closure, instead of the awful not knowing.”
Because many of the firefighters weren’t found quickly, families held memorial services. “Then later they’d identify some remains, so there’d be a funeral,” says McCool. In the end, there were close to 600 services for firemen – 23 on one day alone. “We had to split the pipes and drums,” McCool continues. “I saw Lieut Kevin O’Hagan, a piper, at a funeral in Woodlawn and he was almost crying. He asked me: ‘Whose funeral is this?’”
McCool wears a T-shirt with the words “Ladders 136 (never forgotten) Chris Pickford and Mike Cawley” printed on it. Victims’ families sell shirts for $10 or $15 to raise money for memorial funds. McCool has a drawer full of T-shirts bearing the names of dead men. “You feel you’ve been cheated of the times you would have had with them,” he says. There was Gerry Nevins, for example, who used to bring eggs to the fire station from his farm in upstate New York . . .
Billy Nolan, now 54, left his beloved fire department in 2004 because of lung disease. “They said more people would start getting sick after about 10 years,” Nolan says, listing friends who have developed cancers and emphysema. “When the Trade Center came down, you didn’t see a desk or computer – it was all pulverised,” he explains. “I worked on the 102nd floor as a carpenter in the 1980s and it was full of asbestos. They sprayed the steel with asbestos to fireproof it.”
“There was no glass in the ruins,” McCool joins in. “It was reduced to silica. When that gets in your lungs, it’s there forever. You never get it out.”
Thousands of unsung Irish and Irish-Americans did what they could to ameliorate the tragedy. The family of fireman Michael Lynch has raised millions of dollars for scholarships for the children of firefighters and victims of 9/11.
John Fiddler, a nurse from Dublin, cared for hundreds of survivors in the burn unit at Cornell University Hospital. Jim Doran, whose father came from Wexford, organised the restoration of the Trinity and St Paul’s churches near Ground Zero. Donal Dennehy set up a “sandwich brigade” in his Brooklyn bar, to provide food for first responders and survivors. State senator Martin Golden, whose family came from Galway and Cavan, organised convoys of construction teams, food and equipment for lower Manhattan. Teresa McGovern lost her mother in the Twin Towers, then gave birth to the son she was carrying, Liam.
Colleen Kelly, whose brother Bill was killed on 9/11, became a founding member of the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which has tried to prevent the attacks being used to foster war and revenge. For her work, Kelly received Pax Christi USA's 2011 Teacher of Peace award. (Additional reporting by Ines Novacic)