This is London. In the few fleeting years since our countrymen desisted from bombing the UK capital in our name, the world has become a smaller place.
London was always a home-away-from-home for the Irish, but more and more it becomes much more: a second capital, a place of cultural asylum, a centre of the universe.
Cheap flights, mobile phones, the internet and 24-hour TV news, as well as the percolated effects of the spluttering termination of the Troubles, have made London seem closer to most parts of Ireland than almost any other part. Liverpool Street, King's Cross, Edgware Road are places we know, places our friends live or work. My daughter was born in St Mary's Hospital, across the road from Paddington tube station: like many of us, I know the stops on the Circle Line like the Stations of the Cross.
This is London. I was in Donegal on Thursday when I heard about the bombs, and a short time later listened to a friend in London describing the emerging situation on the Edgware Road. She had been heading for the Underground when she heard about what was happening from a family member in Roscommon. Geography is losing its meaning, but our apprehension of this is delayed. We talk a lot about globalisation, universalism, convergence, but still cling to old working models of who we are and where we stand.
The bombs that used to bring such shame on Ireland were laid for a precisely-stated political purpose, relating to a "cause" with a precise geographical locus and a pretext in a particular history. This experience causes us to slightly misunderstand what is happening now. Al-Qaeda has learned much from the IRA, but has adapted that knowledge to a far more lethal programme.
What happened in London, though bearing echoes of other terrors, other grievances, other wars, belongs to a whole new reality - as new as mobile phones and satellite television, and not entirely coincidental with either. This is a new kind of war that comes from within, from a virtual space in a world that no longer has meaningful boundaries.
Since Thursday, there has been much discussion in the Irish media about whether our political and economic ties with the US and Britain may cause us to be targeted. Are we, for example, implicated because of US military use of Shannon airport? Such questions assume we are dealing with a force that reasons and judges according to fact and arguments, that identifies its enemies on the basis of stated loyalties, intentions and actions.
But, just as last week's bombs made no distinction between Christian and Muslim, neither does it matter where we think we stand or how we manifest that stance. What matters is what we are, and what that means to those who hate it. We are infidels, and our infidelity matters much more than our active collaboration. As part of the hated West, we were a target long before Madrid, Iraq, Afghanistan or 9/11. Al-Qaeda does not care what we say about where we stand: it considers only whether our destruction would amount to a sufficiently emphatic statement of its aims and intentions. Its objective is to remake the world in the image of Islam, its strategy to terrify the West into surrender.
But the penny drops tardily. On the morning of the London bombings, this newspaper reported on a group of middle-aged Irishwomen attending a rally at the G8 summit in Edinburgh where they held placards bearing an image of George W. Bush and the slogan, "World's 1 terrorist". On the letter's page on Saturday, three out of four writers blamed Bush for what had happened in London. Such thinking, which used to be merely tedious, now becomes dangerous.
Let's hope we smell the coffee before we discover what the word terrorism means. Our collective mind, numbed by the dim cynicism of the Michael Moores and Clare Shorts, is slow to grasp what is going down. With our constant talk of "fundamentalism" we have fostered this misleading notion of a primitive peace-loving monster being awoken from its slumbers by Western bellicosity. It's time we got cause and effect in the right order.
The world's number one terrorist? We wish. Very soon we may find ourselves praying that Bush and Tony Blair will be able to strike terror into the hearts of those who perpetrated last week's atrocities.
Al-Qaeda is the globalisation of hate, the first such movement in the history of the planet. It thrives on modernity, on adapting our own hubris to our destruction. Like us, it believes in the end of history, albeit a different ending entirely. Less an organisation than a virus, it holds the multinational franchise for what is less an idea than a sentiment: that the West is evil and must be destroyed. That means us: you, me, our children, our way of life. This sentiment was rampant long before George W. Bush became president of the US.
This is London. Let us awake to the new reality. Either we embrace our true protectors or say hello to the Taliban.