In conversation with
MARY MINIHAN
Enda Kenny, Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader
I WAS changing a wheel on the car outside my house when the news came. Donal Carey rang me to say the twin towers had been hit. There had been initial reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, with the assumption it was an accident involving a light aircraft.
“Quickly, things changed. The later news was almost unbelievable. I recall studying Caesar’s De Bello Gallico as a 12 year old when the news of JFK’s assassination broke. And here on 9/11 was the same sick, clammy feeling. When we switched on the television we began, not so much to watch this story, as actually live it. Moment by moment.
That was a moment of witness – the realisation we were actually living history. There was the sense of being aware of ourselves watching history on that screen. And knowing that things would never be quite the same.
“You never forget your first visit to New York. And as I watched the screen I remembered the jumbo banking over Manhattan. The skyscrapers looming up at the fuselage out of the bay. There was that same intensity of feeling watching the attack unfold. Imagining those canyons of NY streets. The usually couldn’t-give-a-damn New Yorkers screaming, crying. Or just open-mouthed standing there, all looking up. As if to say, ‘No, this could not be happening’.
“I remember vividly the faces and voices of the fire-fighters we caught glimpses of. How calm they seemed. Men and women streaming from the towers and all those firefighters running past them, laden with gear, in the opposite direction. And of course so many of them had to be of Irish descent, their courage etched in their faces.
"Since it happened, I imagine Ruth McCourt and her little girl Juliana dying in that first plane. Their brother and uncle Ron Clifford saying the Our Fatherwith a critically injured woman called Jennieann Maffeo, far beneath them. What to say . . .
“That evening people were out walking at home. Everyone was talking to each other. There was a solidarity in our shock. An inability to comprehend what we had just seen.
“I’ve been to Ground Zero. There’s a quality to the silence there. It’s a silence beyond anything I’ve experienced. It’s a silence that comes from respect for those who perished there.
As if the space has saved itself to replay over and over, at a frequency unavailable to the human ear, those voices, those sounds of that blue-skies Fall day.
"New Yorker and Pulitzer-winner Steve Reich's composition WTC 9/11, based on the recordings of the NYP and NYFD that day, had its Irish premiere recently. Tellingly, WTCstands for World to Come.
“New York, the world, endured. Today, we remember and we honour. I suppose in the best way we can, simply by living as mindfully, kindly as we can.”
Mary Robinson, head of the Climate Justice Foundation and former president
IN 2001 I was based at the UN in Geneva as High Commissioner for Human Rights. I returned home – to Ireland and to Mayo – on September 10th for a short break after the exhausting Durban World Conference against Racism. On the morning of the 11th, a glorious sunny day, my brother Adrian and his wife Ruth invited Nick and myself to join them and two good friends to travel out to the small Inishkea Islands off Belmullet for a picnic and to look at early Christian artefacts. Kevin Hegarty, the local curate was our ‘archaeological guide’ and Vincent Sweeney provided and captained the boat.
“After our very relaxed picnic on the south island we travelled to the north island to view a granite slab featuring the Resurrection of Christ, which was deteriorating. We were having an animated discussion on whether or not it should be moved for safety when Vincent got a call on his phone. His face went white and the words he spoke are imprinted on my memory. He said: ‘Commissioner, you won’t want to hear this, but a plane has hit the Twin Towers in New York and another one is heading for the White House!’
“Our first concern was for Adrian’s son, James, and his fiancee, Camille, both of whom worked in lawyers’ offices close to the Twin Towers. The sun was still shining but our mood had become black and fearful. We returned to Belmullet in a stunned silence. On shore we went to Vincent’s home and watched the scenes in New York unfold. The one bright moment came when we heard James and Camille were safe.
“As I watched the horror of so many lives destroyed deliberately, I had a terrible premonition that this was going to be a very difficult time to uphold the standards of international human rights. Every minute of that day is fixed in my mind as a day in two halves, a day that changed so much.”
John Bowman, broadcaster and historian
I WAS at the first Questions and Answersforward planning meeting of the new season and also with a new editor, Deirdre Younge.
“Deirdre was with me for the following eight or nine years. Deirdre wanted to know, how do you manage ahead of Monday to come up with all the probable topics? This was after the summer, so there were quite a lot of things that hadn’t been covered.
“We were talking away about the probable topics. I can’t remember what they were now. And just at the end I said to Deirdre, none of these is likely to be top of the pile by next Monday. I do remember saying to Deirdre, something else will happen.
“At that stage a head came round the door shouting turn on the TV. So we turned on the TV and we saw the first plane had hit . It was presumed to be a horrific accident.
Then we saw the second plane hitting the building. And I said, this is the biggest moment in American history, because this is an attack on America. America just does not fight its wars at home. We just watched; it was live on TV. Whatever it was it was three dimensions of the modern world: aviation, skyscrapers and live TV. It was an act of terrorism that wanted to be televised live, as it happened.
“There was this kind of treble effect: they were multiplying the terrorism by maximising the punch.
The skyscrapers, the live camera and the aeroplane as the weapon: an extraordinary treble.”
Catherine McGuinness, Irish Refugee Council patron and former Supreme Court judge
PROINSIAS [Mac Aonghusa], my late husband, and myself were away on holiday in north Portugal at the time. We were in this rather old-fashioned touring boat on the Douro river. We were there in a kind of little cabin. One of the boat’s crew came along and said something extraordinary was happening on TV. It wasn’t the kind of boat where you had a TV in your cabin!
There was just one TV, with a very dicey connection, and the commentary was in Portuguese, although we could make something out from the pictures. The reception was so bad and kept coming and going, and the fellows on the boat were trying to get the TV going again.
“Proinsias was a journalist, and he was going mad to find out what the facts were and what was really going on.
“I was kind of horrified and yet uncomprehending at the same time, and there was no connection with the shore. It wasn’t really until the next day that we were able to get newspapers when the boat had a stopover.
You tend to forget how much has changed in terms of technology. We weren’t all sitting there with our iPhones.”
Michael Lockhart, from Greystones, Co Wicklow, who got eight A1s in the Leaving Cert and will start studying Medicine at Trinity in a few weeks
I DON’T really have a memory of it. I was eight. I remember my parents being very shocked. I was in the car with mum listening to it [on the radio] as it happened. She was shocked, but it didn’t really register with me how serious it was. Mum called my dad and they were both shocked, and when he came home we all watched it on TV.
“I was watching it, having dinner and it was on in the TV room. The people jumping from the buildings: I do remember that clearly. You don’t see that every day. It was horrible. It was something I think I had to see because it was so serious. Nobody I knew was affected, but soon after I heard lots of people talking about it, teachers and so on, not just my parents, and it was on the news every day. That’s when it hit home.”
Dan Rooney, US ambassador and former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers
I WAS actually in my office in Three Rivers Stadium and I didn’t have the TV set on. I was preparing to leave because the NFL (National Football League) had a meeting scheduled for 2pm. I fly, I’m a pilot, if I’d taken off I would have got caught.
“Someone came into my office and said you’d better turn on the TV. It was just as the second plane hit into the west tower.
“It was really unbelievable. My own impression was that this was an act of terror and obviously these people had it planned. It was just a terrible act; to do something like this against innocent citizens was something that I just thought was a terrible thing.
“You were just mesmerised with it obviously, when the buildings collapsed and all the smoke and dust that went all over everything. The one thing that was really difficult was when you saw people jumping out of the windows. That was really grave.
“As things went on you heard about all the great things the firefighters and police did, and the loss of their lives. We feel a real sense of loss . . . the loss of people was the most difficult, remembering them.”
John Bruton, former taoiseach and EU ambassador to Washington
WAS just coming into the house here. My Garda driver said to me just before I came in, ‘Oh, something terrible has happened in New York’.
I thought of some huge financial collapse, but it was something far, far worse. My wife was watching the TV, so she knew more than I did. Within a minute or two . . . I suppose just the horror and sort of horrible fascination as well with the grotesque nature of what was happening. And afterwards, the people jumping out of the building to certain death because the heat was intolerable. .. Their agony can barely be contemplated.
“I was in the US two weeks later giving a lecture in Princeton. Virtually everyone I met knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who had been killed. It was very local to them. Another thing struck me: how calm they were. I couldn’t see any frantic, irrational desire for revenge. They were people in deep mourning, but calm.
“I think people realised the methods one uses to combat terrorist were not necessarily the methods one uses to combat a conventional military enemy.
“The people I met were sophisticated enough to understand that, and I’m not just talking about academics. It seemed the further away you got the more jingoistic people were and the closer you got the less jingoistic, although I can’t prove that.”
Joanne Richardson, American Chamber of Commerce chief executive
I WAS the general manager for Delta Airlines [in Ireland] at that time, and this is the gospel truth: on that day it was announced I was leaving Delta to take up the position of chief executive of the American Chamber of Commerce. My boss had come over from the US [to Dublin] to support the announcement, and we took my team out for lunch. We came back and this is all happening. We went up to our boardroom and put on the TV.
“It was obviously a shock. There was sadness, tears and disbelief at the sheer horror of what was unfolding in front of our eyes. There’s no doubt the world changed on that day, particularly for the families of those who lost their lives.
“The immediate impact was the enormity and the horror of what we were witnessing. Nothing like that has ever happened in the world to any airline or business. All airlines were deeply impacted and united on the day. We needed to get those aeroplanes out of the sky; they needed to be grounded as soon as possible, and the nearest landmasses were Newfoundland and Ireland. Half the fleet ended up between Dublin and Shannon.
“The second priority was the logistics of how we would look after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of passengers. It took on a life of its own. Like everyone else, I suppose it’s etched into the memory.”
Denis Hickie, former professional rugby player
I CAN remember quite clearly. I was a professional rugby player with Leinster. We were playing a team called Pontypridd from Wales that evening, so I was waking up after an afternoon nap. I turned on the TV and watched most of it in bed. It’s not the sort of thing you can turn off.
“The first plane had already hit and it was being established what had happened. There was a lot of confusion. As the presenter was talking I saw the second plane going in live. It was a very strange, surreal thing. Not a million miles away from my parents hearing about Kennedy getting shot.
“I remember thinking to myself, is this match going to be on? I’m not quite sure why I thought that. I think just a lot of people thought, ‘What next?’ Playing a match seemed irrelevant. I remember it was an Indian summer, not like now, and one of those lovely long evenings. The pitch is always amazing at the start of the year. It was a little bit surreal to be playing, but at the same time it was work, and everyone’s got to go to work. It was a league match, what was then known as the Celtic League.
“Guys were talking about it beforehand and afterwards. I remember somebody saying, this is going to be a life-changing event. And if you think back to what’s happened: hundreds of thousands of people dead; America a deeply divided country. It’s a remarkable piece of history.
“We won the match. I remember that, which is pathetic.”
Garry Hynes, theatre director with Druid
I WAS actually in LA and I had just arrived the night before. I was in a small hotel. I couldn’t sleep so at 6am I went down to the desk to try and see if I could get a paper. I found two guys talking about this event. They said an airplane had flown into the Twin Towers. I think like everyone I thought it was a small plane that had badly lost its way. As I walked back along the corridor I noticed a lot of the doors of the bedrooms were open. The rooms were being serviced but the staff were just sitting on the beds watching TV. I switched on the TV and it was pretty terrifying. I was very far away from home. City officials were saying there were no credible threats to Los Angeles. I remember that phrase was being repeated constantly.
“It was very, very weird. I think I was just overwhelmed by the scale of it. It’s an area of New York I know very well.
“As a student working in New York I used to live in Staten Island in the summers, so I know that downtown area like the back of my hand. The apartment I lived in had a view of lower New York. I watched the Twin Towers being built and the lights finally coming on in the buildings.”