Two things – from a bigger number – have struck me about ourselves in the context of the commemorations of the 9/11 terrorist massacre. It deserves no other name. The first makes me sad, and the second is part of why it makes me sad.

The first is the moaning which is going on about America’s response and the supposed consequences of that response – loss of civil liberties, unpopularity in the world, the financial costs of waging war to protect itself (and in reality, us as well) from its enemies of the moment, and so on. I write from an Irish perspective and have to admit that the stage has been reached where a feeling of revulsion arises in me as I turn the page of a newspaper to see yet another analysis of so-called American decline and fall. I move quickly on to the next page.

The second is the awareness of how much of what happened is part of our world. I don’t mean the wider world but I do mean a wider Irish world. The atrocity of 9/11 was undoubtedly a global event, but it was also very much and event closer to home for us than for many other societies. National identity is not a simple thing anymore. It is a very complex thing in the modern world and it is important to come to terms with it. A nation’s diaspora, for some reason perhaps more so for the Irish than for other nations, is part of its identity. Identity is no longer bounded by territory. It is bounded by somenting much more transcendent.

This was brought home to me this morning which I read and was deeply moved by an article in the New York Times which is part of its commemorative series, THE RECKONING: AMERICA AND THE WORLD A DECADE AFTER 9/11,  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/us/sept-11-reckoning/queens.html?hp . Something about the community described here, its people and their tragic losses, connected in a way which transcended the ocean between us.

Furthermore, this transcendent identity which the real world has created for us here on this island over two centuries has a kind of liberating effect. It liberates us from the small-minded insularity which sometimes seems to engulf us – and just now more than ever before as we bemoan our loss of an illusory sovereignty.

The connection between this and the sadness induced by the other is precisely because the other seems to heartlessly obliterate the lives and preoccupations of these people. There is a callousness about the analysis they offer of the American response which goes beyond a simple assessment of the means and method of that response and seems to question the very right of Americans to attempt to defend themselves and vindicate their dead and suffering.

Below is the text of the specific article to which the link above should also take you. It is long, but no less moving for that.

Hit Hard by 9/11, a Piece of Queens Struggles to Let Go

By ANNE BARNARD Published: September 8, 2011

Just off the boardwalk, towheaded children bounced on a blow-up trampoline. Grown-ups bantered and showed off babies. An annual charity event was starting off summer on the Rockaway peninsula, a sliver of Queens jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. In the usual place of honor, between the Budweiser and the barbecue, stood photographs of grinning young men: all childhood friends, all dead.

The roguish blond one brandishing the beer mug — Charles F. X. Heeran— died on Sept. 11, 2001. One of 12 killed from his church alone, he worked at the bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, high up in the World Trade Center. The one in shades and flak vest, Michael D. Glover, joined the Marines, spurred by Charlie’s death. In 2006, Lance Corporal Glover was killed by a sniper in Iraq.

Ten years after 9/11, a kind of memory industry hums along in Rockaway.

The peninsula suffered one of the nation’s most concentrated losses when the terrorist attacks scythed through generations of firefighters and Wall Street traders in the largely Irish-Catholic neighborhoods here. Fifty-nine people from Rockaway died; about 70 counting summer and former residents. One enclave, Breezy Point, lost 32 of its 5,000 people. A proportional hit to New York City would have taken 51,000 lives.

So every summer come the memorial events, one after another, a comfort and a duty to many around here, and a growing burden to others. Every bereft family, it seems, has its own golf outing or concert or surfing contest — all for charity.

This is one ripple effect of the attacks that few here want to see fade: People are still responding with personal action, switching careers to risk death fighting wars, or fires, starting organizations that rush, even compete, to help neighbors in need.

Rockaway’s effort to come to grips with the collective trauma of Sept. 11 often seems like a denser version of the nation’s struggle as a whole. As the 10th anniversary approached, families here were weighing how much to keep 9/11 a centerpiece of identity and daily life — and how much to edge mourning aside and move ahead.

The unusual interconnectedness of the grief — the shared loss of multiple relatives, friends and neighbors — made the ambivalence all the more raw.

At the July 1 charity event, Mr. Heeran’s older brother, Sean, stepped to a microphone. His voice broke as he saluted the killing of Osama bin Laden: “Here’s a shout-out to Seal Team 6!”

Then he thanked the crowd for supporting the RIBS Foundation, short for Rockaway Irish Boys, which honors his brother and two friends. Since 2002, it has handed out $200,000 to neighbors facing problems like medical bills and tuition shortfalls.

Sipping a beer nearby was Mike Moran, a firefighter who lost his brother,John, a fire battalion chief, on Sept. 11. His family was pondering a big step. The 10th golf outing for John Moran, held earlier in this same spot, might be the last.

“Ten years is enough,” their mother, Peggy, 80, said. “I don’t expect everyone else to be in mourning with me.”

But that notion had already brought pushback from an old family friend — the Heerans’ father, Bernie, a retired firefighter.

Devoting himself to charity, Bernie Heeran has become the neighborhood’s designated custodian of 9/11 memories, building a prayer garden at the church, raising money for the parish school and a memorial park, and covering the walls of his pub, the Harbor Light, with photographs and mementos of the dead.

To some neighbors, the pub is a comforting shrine; others call it a depressing mausoleum.

Still, most people accept one another’s mixed feelings, said Steve Stathis, who runs Rockaway’s first and largest post-9/11 charity, the Graybeards.

“Ten years is usually the last memorial,” he said at his surf shop. “Should it be the last one? Everyone said we’d never forget. I really don’t know how I feel about that. Is there a time when it’s right to stop?”

He sometimes hears people grumble about Mr. Heeran’s pub.

“But he’s the one who lost a son,” Mr. Stathis said he tells them. “What are you going to say: ‘I think you should redecorate’? There’s only one answer: It’s up to each family. Who are we to say?”

Network of Bereavement

Beach 129th Street in the Belle Harbor section of Rockaway has the storefronts of a small-town Main Street — gas station, deli, barber — and a few clapboard houses. The five Heerans — Sean, the fraternal twinsCharlie and Billy, and two sisters — grew up there, in Rockaway fashion, amid herds of children whose parents were friends and who stayed friends into adulthood.

Children roamed free, “pool hopping” through backyards; parents knew where they had been before they got home. Most went to the parochial school, St. Francis de Sales. Later, teenagers calling themselves Rockaway Irish Boys worked as lifeguards by day and sneaked beers by night in a spot on the beach called the Cove.

“We caused havoc,” Billy Heeran recalls.

Many followed fathers and uncles into the Fire Department; others followed a Catholic-school network to Wall Street. So when hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, they ravaged an extraordinarily interlaced world.

The Heerans, mourning Charlie, 23, found themselves in a nexus of bereavement. His brothers worked in finance — Sean, fatefully, had just left Cantor — and lost dozens of colleagues. Their father, Bernie, lost a dozen firefighter friends.

Bernie Heeran held court on his porch, accepting condolences and soothing firefighters who felt guilty for being alive. Scores of neighborhood men dug rubble all day, then drank at the Harbor Light. Some decided to turn their basketball league, the Graybeards, into a charity organization. Forty people showed up for the first meeting.

Two months after the attacks, a jetliner crashed — almost unbelievably — right into the neighborhood, near the pub. Men exhausted from ground zero ran out to douse flames and collect bodies. One of the five killed on the ground was Charlie Heeran’s close friend Christopher Lawler, 23.

The surreal coincidence brought numerous reporters to Rockaway, along with the first inkling that there was such a thing as too much focus on Sept. 11. Bernie Heeran told his story again and again: how he pushed Charlie to work on Wall Street, where it was “safe”; how in a last phone call he advised him to go to the roof, where, it turned out, there was no escape.

Eventually, Mr. Heeran stopped talking.

Life went on — differently. Already patriotic, the neighborhood became more so. The Heerans’ next-door neighbors were among the first to change their lives. One, Jimmy Brady, then 24, flew home from New Zealand, where he played professional rugby, to join the Fire Department. He recalls feeling he was rushing to defend his home, “like coming back to your country in a war.” His brother quit college to do the same.

Another friend, Michael Glover, postponed law school to join the Marines. He could not have been more steeped in 9/11. His uncle, Peter E. Hayden, a deputy fire chief and friend of the Heerans, initially commanded the north tower rescue.

Mr. Glover, who grew up living with the Haydens, told them he was fighting for Charlie. He was killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2006, wearing his uncle’s cross, made of ground-zero steel.

Billy Heeran remembers hearing the news: “I almost fainted.”

The Heeran brothers had helped start the RIBS Foundation to honor Charlie and the friend killed by the plane in Queens, Mr. Lawler. Now they added Mr. Glover, 28. They bought a weekend house, to get away and enjoy being together. They wrote Internet messages to Charlie on his birthdays, envisioning him in heaven in a Hawaiian shirt.

Each seized his first chance to join the Fire Department. They had taken the qualifying test before the attacks, a Rockaway tradition, never intending to join. But their finance jobs in Lower Manhattan had come to feel eerie.

Their Brooklyn firehouses might seem an odd refuge — a firefighter from Sean’s house died with his brother, a police officer; one of Billy’s colleagues lost his father, a fire chief. Firefighters now train constantly for the next 9/11 — a subway gas attack, for instance. It worries the brothers’ friend Mr. Brady enough that he urges his wife to take the bus.

But Sept. 11 was already woven through the brothers’ lives. It even led to Sean’s marriage. His childhood friend Lynn Allen, after her brother Richie died that day on his first firefighting mission, dropped into a Midtown bar where Sean was moonlighting. They traded tips on peaceful places to pray. (Sean recommended St. Patrick’s.) They married in 2005 and named their first daughter Charley Mae, after her uncle Charlie.

Later, at a bar with firefighters, Billy met Elise Berlau, from Kansas. On their first date, she asked if he knew anyone killed on Sept. 11. When he replied that he lost his twin, he recalls, “There was a silence for like 10 minutes.”

That moment sealed their bond. Ms. Berlau came to understand that marrying Billy was marrying Rockaway, and to some extent, Sept. 11.

During the difficult Septembers, she said, men repair to bars: “Their approach to grieving is just sharing memories. The wives, the girlfriends just kind of step away.”

But, she said as they chased their toddler around their oceanside apartment, “It doesn’t rule my life.

“And,” she added, turning to Billy, “it doesn’t rule yours.”

No Escape at Home

Ten years later, 9/11 is inscribed on the Rockaway landscape. The altered Manhattan skyline shimmers across the bay. Names of the dead can be read on a stained-glass dome in a memorial park; on trees where streets dead-end at the beach; on a new church organ. American flags flutter from porches and streetlights.

People wear signs of grief on their bodies. It is rare to walk down Beach 129th Street without seeing a memorial T-shirt or bracelet or tattoo. Every Tuesday, volunteers tend the new park between 8:30 and 10:30 a.m. — roughly the time of the attacks. Every summer, the anniversary windup stirs emotions. This year, they are more intense.

Mike Moran is brash and jocular, known for his taunt at an October 2001 concert, “Osama bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish ass!” But at his family’s event in June, he broke down telling how Sept. 11 persuaded him and his longtime girlfriend to marry.

He is alive because he switched shifts that day; his entire fire truck crew died. In July, he watched the mangled truck towed from storage, as if in a funeral, and installed in the museum at ground zero.

Now the family was contemplating closing another chapter: the annual golf outing that honors Mr. Moran’s brother, John. Attendance is down. And the event is always bittersweet, their sister Ellen said, because it forces family members to publicly confront one another’s grief.

“It’s very easy for me to put the walls up around myself and contain my own pain,” she said, “but very difficult for me to watch my mother and my brother and sister in pain.”

Her mother, Peggy, leaned on Ellen’s arm, eyeing the men talking to her grandson Ryan, who was 7 when his father died. Now 17, he takes military survival courses, hoping to join the Navy Seals. Peggy Moran confided later that she worries he courts danger because he hears too much about “his father the hero.”

“He wasn’t a hero,” she said. “He was just an ordinary person,” doing his job.

Ellen Moran, 56, is often reminded that some wounds go too deep to redeem with charity and patriotism. After her brother died, a close relative, a child, developed severe emotional problems that persist in adulthood. Ms. Moran’s neighbor, who lost a brother, committed suicide.

There is no escape in Rockaway, Ms. Moran said. You bump into 9/11 relatives in the store, you socialize with them; when they marry each other, you are invited. But there is comfort in that, too, she said.

Later, at the RIBS golf outing, Charlie Heeran and his friends were clearly not forgotten. Friends toasted the 3-month-old Michael Glover Tubridy, one of several babies named for the fallen Marine. Most spoke anonymously about their neighborhood aid work, displaying a Rockaway aversion to self-promotion.

“You may not hear much about it,” Sean Heeran told the crowd. “But you know it’s happening — and it’s you.”

Younger men smoking nearby were children on Sept. 11. But it is a defining memory; each Saturday at the beach, they plant an American flag in the sand. One, just back from Iraq, ribbed his friends: “You felt safer when I was over there, right?”

Sitting nearby, Mr. Glover’s uncle, Pete Hayden, retired from the top uniformed job in the post-9/11 Fire Department, said he no longer gave speeches on his experience. “I didn’t want to talk about it anymore,” Mr. Hayden said.

Six days later came a 9/11 tradition that swings the focus from private grief toward public patriotism, Wounded Warrior Weekend. Flag-waving crowds cheered as injured Iraq and Afghanistan veterans rode into Rockaway — famous now among many veterans for its hospitality — to stay in families’ homes. Fire trucks, police helicopters and fireboats escorted them, a show of Rockaway’s clout in the uniformed city agencies.

One family held a sign connecting military sacrifices to firefighters’ deaths on 9/11: “Thank you for avenging our 343 fallen brothers.”

‘This’ll Be the Last One’

On Sunday morning, a piece of crumpled steel from Sept. 11 will be unveiled in the memorial park in Belle Harbor. Across the water, a growing construction site glitters by night, slowly filling the space where the towers stood.

Belle Harbor’s priest, Msgr. John Brown, has requested remembrances for a parish history. There has been little response. “The first question I got,” he said, “was, ‘Why?’ ”

In their no-frills way, the Heeran brothers are taking stock.

“I think about what my brother would be doing,” Sean said. “He’d be a multimillionaire on Wall Street. He’d be a father.”

Billy said: “I’m over his death. But not over the fact that he was killed by terrorists.”

Their whole family is going to ground zero on Sunday, for the first time in years. Billy hates seeing other bereaved parents there; Sean and his wife prefer visiting their brothers’ graves. (They had the grim luck of recovering remains.) “I think this’ll be the last one,” Billy said. “I just want Sept. 12 to be a new day.”

Small things still flatten Ellen Moran: catching her mother crying at her rosary; seeing pictures of her brother John’s boys. “I’m caught off guard more often than I would like today, that it’s still such a powerful shock,” she said. “That whole surrealness, it just hits you again — like, did that really happen?”

For renewal she visits the beach, where things never change — big families, rusty beach wagons — or her new grandchild, her first, and thinks, “Finally things are looking up.”

The Morans ultimately decided to stop the annual John Moran golf outing. But Bernie Heeran plans to take over.

 

Might it be only a matter of time before a sizable section of the Irish electorate wakes up to what is really going on under the surface in the political and media seconded onslaught on the universal Catholic Church? There are signs that it may not be much longer before they see through how the Irish Labour Party’s  the Labour atheist liberals are steamrolling the blustering but ultimately lightweight Enda Kenny into a secularist cul-de-sac which is an alien place for most of his party faithful.

The Labour Party’s unscrupulous exploitation of the victimhood of those who suffered sexual abuse and the constant use of the “safe place for children” mantra will surely soon begin to wear thin. The lady doth protest too much and the reality of compassion fatigue will set in – as it has for many already. When it does, the nakedness of the secularists’ venom will become clear and we will all be able to deal with the real issue here – the battle for the hearts and mind of the people of Ireland.

As matters stand just now every effort to expose this real agenda is confronted with a nauseating and hypocritical cry of horror that the abuse of children is being heartlessly ignored – for any number of ulterior and unworthy motives.

If and when people who have a real faith-based loyalty to the Catholic Church, the Church which the majority of Irish people still believe was founded by Jesus Christ himself and on which they believe the ultimate good of their society and their eternal salvation depends, begin to see what is really going on here then there may be a political reckoning for the resurgent Labour Party and their fellow-travellers which they did not… well, reckon on.

Paul Cullen, writing in The Irish Times on Tuesday  http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0906/1224303590313.html

hinted at the way this whole affair might be unfolding politically. His observations suggested something of the inexorable law of unintended consequesnces which might be unfolding for Mr. Kenny.

The Vatican’s response of last Saturday, he says, “by dint of its detailed rebuttal of the accusations hurled by the Taoiseach Enda Kenny and the deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Eamon Gilmore, over the summer, puts the ball firmly back in their court. It demands of that they substantiate the claims they have made against the spiritual leaders of the country’s dominant faith.”

Eamon Gilmore tells us he has no interest in being drawn into a prolonged bout of nit-picking with the Vatican over “this phrase and that”. “As the leader of a secular, left-wing party, he can probably afford to adopt this stance, safe in the knowledge that it will play well with his natural support base”, Cullen thinks.

The Taoiseach, he says, faces a different challenge, both personal and political. “He is a committed, Mass-going Catholic, and this fact lent his criticisms of last July particular pungency. He is also the leader of a traditional, right-of-centre political party with long historical ties to the church. As such, he can’t just brush off the implied criticism of his position contained in the Vatican’s response. He must also pay heed to the words of Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, almost a lone voice in his church in criticising his colleagues’ response to abuse.”

There is enormous respect for Archbishop Martin and that he would now be calling for some accountability from Mr. Kenny is significant and something that will be noticed.

What might be coming down the tracks for Irish politicians was predicted for their counterparts across the Irish Sea this week in London’s Daily Telegraph. This was in the context of the handling by politicians there of the effort to ameliorate some of the rather horrific consequences of Britain’s abortion laws. It seems that the Conservative leadership have got cold feet about some amendments to legislation which would have this effect. They have been “got at” by the abortion lobby and are putting pressure on back-bench Tories who were favouring the amendment.

Christina Odone commented in the Telegraph: “This kind of bullying, once the preserve of the Labour Party, is surfacing among Tories under a PM who feels insecure about “ethical” issues. As a former (and according to his then tutor Vernon Bogdanor, brilliant) PPE student, Dave knows his rights from his wrongs. The problem is, he also knows that the liberal establishment he curries favour with (those hacks and TV producers, think-tankers and PR professionals he’s partied with since his 30s) abhor any hint of a conservative morality”

She then sounds a warning note, which members of the Irish parliament might do well to take note of: “But beware, Members of Parliament, of following pied piper Dave over the cliff. As the ever-splendid Ann Widdecombe has warned, a vote against the amendments may well cost you your post. The reason? Three little words: Dr Evan Harris. The former Tory minister points out how Dr Harris, who enjoyed a comfortable majority (7683) as Lib Dem MP in Oxford West and Abingdon, had irked, with his secularist agenda, Christians in his constituency. During the election, Church groups lobbied against him. And they won: to the shock horror of the liberal establishment who revere Dr Harris for his right-on atheist fundamentalism, the good doctor bit the dust; Nicola Blackman, a young Tory, took the seat with a 17 majority.

“That’s quite a turnaround. And it should send a shiver of fear down every MP’s spine today: you mess with people of conscience at your peril.” http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100103496/abortion-vote-the-fate-of-dr-evan-harris-should-be-a-warning-to-mps-who-ignore-their-christian-voters/

Perhaps it is time for Irish parliamentarians to take stock of the real value of their political capital and not take their electorate too much for granted, playing fast and loose as they have been with their emotions – and their consciences.

As posted on www.MercatorNet.com  this morning.

Hopes that the Vatican’s recent response to attacks by Ireland’s politicians might relieve some of the tension in Irish Church-State relations seem over-optimistic. The Vatican was ostensibly commenting on an inquiry into how the Catholic diocese of Cloyne dealt with clerical sex abuse of children. But more significantly, it responded vigorously and rigorously to fierce criticism by politicians – includingan extraordinary attack on the Holy See made in parliament by Prime Minister Enda Kenny.

Immediate reaction by Irish politicians in the last few days has been guarded but they were hardly conciliatory. Mr Kenny said he stood by his allegations. Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore remained “unconvinced”. This was before either of them had studied the document. The omens are not good.

This is a great pity. If the interests and the welfare of children were really what the government was striving for –Mr Gilmore’s mantra – then the appeal of the Vatican would not be falling on deaf ears. The document calls for “the restoration of mutual confidence and collaboration between Church and State authorities, which is essential for the effective combating of the scourge of abuse. Naturally, the Holy See is well aware that the painful situation to which the episodes of abuse have given rise cannot be resolved swiftly or easily, and that although much progress has been made, much remains to be done.”

We can only hope, however, that when all the face-saving has been done – because politicians are very reluctant ever to say “I was wrong about that” — Church and State will abandon the blame game, work together and get on with the job of making society a safer place for children.

In the long term, however, what is disturbing about this conflict is what it reveals about the character of contemporary Irish political life. There is a shameless populism in the politicians’ grandstanding. It is this populism that keeps them at loggerheads with the Holy See.

Government spokesmen have been riding on the crest of a wave of “public anger and frustration.” It was quite clear that their hope was that this anger might continue to prejudice the public’s view of Vatican’s response. Their hopes are being realised.

But this crisis in relations with the Holy See should prompt the public to question the Irish Government’s own record. Just last week a sociologist from Trinity College Dublin pointed out the dangers of exaggerating clerical child abuse. Dr Helen Buckley, a sociologist at Trinity College Dublin, said serious scandals such as that in the Catholic diocese of Cloyne attracted huge media focus which was disproportionate to the incidence of child sex abuse cases. Clerical sexual abuse needs to be reported on in correct proportion to the “tiny” minority of the population affected, she said.

“A lot of the [media] activity in the past few months concerns Cloyne, and while it is very serious, it’s quite tiny,” Dr Buckley said. “I feel there’s a danger because clerical sex abuse touches such a nerve in this country, and the [child protection] system could become skewed. It needs to be seen in proportion,” she said.

Recently appointed to the Irish Health Service Executive’s advisory committee on children and family services, Dr Buckley voiced concern at the proposed introduction of mandatory reporting of cases of child abuse. Ironically, the whole question of mandatory reporting – and the Church’s supposed reservations about it — was a key one in the Irish government’s trenchant attack on the Vatican.

Will the Irish government act on the recommendations of people like Dr. Buckley with the same determination as it demanded from the Church authorities? In all the bluster there has been no mention of the shocking revelations last year that the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) “believes that approximately 200 children have died in state care in the last ten years.”

“The figures are emerging”, the report went on, “as part of a nationwide probe and are ten times greater than the previously admitted number of deaths — the HSE had said that 23 children had died in care.” This all came to light following an audit of HSE files following the controversy over a report into the tragic death of a teenager.

Newspaper columnist Sinead Ryan was scathing: “We have no cohesive child-welfare policy funded and run by a single entity. We are brilliant at writing reports on how to care for children and abysmal at actually caring for them. We are worse at holding anyone accountable when failures happen.”

The Vatican has spoken very candidly of its shame and sorrow “for the terrible sufferings which the victims of abuse and their families have had to endure within the Church of Jesus Christ, a place where this should never happen.” No such words as yet from the state in respect of the deaths of 200 children taken into its care. In fact, the bureaucracy has denied allegations, admitted the possibility of a higher tally only under extreme pressure and stonewalled inquiries even by the responsible minister. The chief executive of Barnardos, Fergus Finlay, said that the deaths were “deeply shocking, as is the fact that the review team has not been handed a single file.”

“This is a scandal of enormous proportions for which some immediate answers are required in the public interest,” declared Alan Shatter, now the Minister for Justice, last year. “How could it be the case that so little value was attached to the lives of these children and that until now, no action was taken to identify and collate the numbers dying in care or to review the circumstances of their individual deaths?”

Some Irish people are beginning to see a double standard at work.