9/11 ten years on ...

Looking at this purely from a catastrophic event perspective and the unparalleled media coverage (live mostly) what are your thoughts 10 years on? I remember it better than most events in my life and better than more recent ones. I was due back in work the following day after a long holiday and was upstairs with (unusually) the TV on when it all unfolded. I was glued. I had inlaws in NY at the time - one a volunteer fireman upstate and thoughts turned to him. It was incredible stuff and more like some Stallone/Willis movie than real life. The planes hitting the towers, the collapses, the mushroom clouds, the 'jumpers' - just unbelievable. Even now I find myself glued to the many programmes showing this week.

A year later I visited the ruins and there was still more than enough physical and emotional evidence of the events.

That day certainly changed the world.

Aside from US foreign policy then and since and political/military ramifications, any thoughts on it ten years on?

Jayo Cluxton wrote:Looking at this purely from a catastrophic event perspective and the unparalleled media coverage (live mostly) what are your thoughts 10 years on? I remember it better than most events in my life and better than more recent ones. I was due back in work the following day after a long holiday and was upstairs with (unusually) the TV on when it all unfolded. I was glued. I had inlaws in NY at the time - one a volunteer fireman upstate and thoughts turned to him. It was incredible stuff and more like some Stallone/Willis movie than real life. The planes hitting the towers, the collapses, the mushroom clouds, the 'jumpers' - just unbelievable. Even now I find myself glued to the many programmes showing this week.

A year later I visited the ruins and there was still more than enough physical and emotional evidence of the events.

That day certainly changed the world.

Aside from US foreign policy then and since and political/military ramifications, any thoughts on it ten years on?

Truthfully JC i thought lets go and kill these Muslim fookers,but within weeks i realised that these lads were not really the problem......And Bush got what he wanted a war about oil....Really feel for all the innocent people that died that day/but i also feel for all the people that have died in the war on terror in all countries...

The day it happened I was at work and in and out of meetings – was hearing that there had been a plane crash – terrorist attack etc. but didn’t appreciate the scale of what was happening assumed it was something like a combination of Lockerbie/Oklahoma. Got home that evening and probably watched the coverage non-stop till the early hours. I suppose it was the first time that we have ever seen something of the scale, involving something as iconic where there was live coverage. At the time it was certainly both shocking and surreal, I’d been on top of the WTC about 2 years before that which again put a perspective on it. As JC stated though the images and the coverage are more vivid
in my memory that many things that have happened before or since. For e.g The earthquake in Japan or the Asian Tsunami. The post event imagery of people putting up pictures trying to track lost relatives also remains a poignant image. I went back there in early Oct 2003 which is probably near enough when JC was there and the Fire brigade T shirts and the scale of the hole in the ground again remain vivid in my memory. As an aside from that to show how crass and vulgar American culture can be – I visited Vegas the following week and can remember that for Authenticity they had tied a few token Fire Dept T-shirts to the railings of the New York – New York Hotel which was one of the most distastefully commercial things I have ever seen.


As Mullins said I think the post the event we all got a little tied up in an anti Islamic mind-frame maybe even more so in Ireland because of the fact that the police force – the Fire Dept – Bars in Downtown Manhattan had a strong Irish-American dynamic. I also remember the Bertie public holiday in sympathy and the local backlash when Lidl decided business as usual.

As regards the aftermath whilst I don’t buy into conspiracy theories and I don’t really think that “afternoon nap” bush was smart enough to have any agenda ultimately it played out well for the hawks. The hard right group of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Rice etc got their war with Afghanistan and ultimately with Iraq – They got their oil – They got the huge defence supply and oil service contracts for their mates in Halliburton and Co. – They took the American publics eye off a post Dot com crash flagging economy and got their second term. And ultimately probably 100 times as many innocent people have died in Afghanistan and Iraq that were no more at fault for 9/11 ,than you or I but we don’t a fox Studio in Halmud province so the western world don’t really know or care.

Was in school that afternoon, double Technical Drawing class.

The computer room was across from the TD room, and at about 3.10 the computer teacher can across and took the TD teacher out of the room. A moment later he returned and said "Lads, I think ye all need to see this."
There was a small television in the classroom off the computer room, and we watched poor quality RTE as they replayed images of the collapse of Tower 2. Whilst we were watching we saw Tower 1 fall as well. Never been in a room full of teenagers that was so quiet.
We stayed in that room until 3.50 (home time), just watching in shock.
As we filtered out, many people, both students and teachers, hadn't heard anything, and thought we were making it up. Was a surreal atmosphere around the place. Got home straight away and was glued to Sky News for the rest of the evening.


As some of you know on here I lived/worked in NYC for a number of months last year. It was only really then that the full scale of what had happened became apparant to me. I lived in an apartment facing onto Little West St, 3 blocks from Ground Zero. My sitting room window look directly out at the site. Walking past the building site on the way to work every morning, seeing the pictures on the all of the fire house on Liberty St. All little reminders of what happened that day.
I'd encourage anyone who visits NYC to go to the memorial museum (it was located on Liberty Street, just up from the fire house - but was planned to move to a bigger location). Seeing the messages from people who lost friends and family is truly heart-breaking.

National Geographic showed the documentary "9/11" by the two French brothers who were working with FDNY that day, and were in the North Tower both when the 2nd plane hit Tower 2, and when the South Tower came down. Some truly terrifying footage at times, but some very moving stuff in there was well. Mychal Judge praying with people in the Lobby Tower 1, just moments before being killed is one that sticks in the memory.