Workplace memory of 911

Anna Kenny called it. She was always on the ball. A young sub-editor training on new technology in the basement of the old Irish Times building in Dublin, she said to those with her in the room, “Someone’s flown in to the Twin Towers in New York.”

What? There were about 10 of us, led by me, getting familiar with the new direct-publishing technology that the flagship Irish broadsheet was adopting, learning new tricks. It was a Tuesday afternoon in September, a mild day. When Anna commented, it took a while to compute. What was that about? I said, “Do you mean, like that guy Mathias Rust in Moscow?” Rust was the German teenager who, as a late Cold War stunt, had flown a single-engine Cessna into  Red Square in 1987.

It was strange, and we were busy, so I turned back to what we were doing, puzzling over the future. But then Anna, legitimately reading news sites to use stories in our exercises, said: “There’s another one.” And we saw the first images.

It’s a strange feeling, your whole world being destabilised. In Dublin we were just experiencing the faint seismic echoes of the physical and psychological earthquake that was striking the east coast of the United States. On that afternoon we suspended the technology classes and I went back to the newsroom. A colleague and I, realising we would have to wait some hours before any clarity emerged, went to the pub across the road where, just like in movies, everyone was staring at the screen showing those unthinkable images. Over and over, the small flying object smashed silently into the vertical champion of modernity, against a clear blue sky. What was ending, and what was beginning?

It was a long night, challenging but immensely satisfying. The decision was taken to print the news pages of The Irish Times with the new technology we were learning – sink or swim. Some of the journalists, notably Conor O’Clery, then the New York correspondent, performed extraordinary feats of professional heroism. O’Clery actually watched the smoke of the falling towers from his apartment window. While others fled, he sat and did his job. 

If you were around on that day, you will probably remember the initial panic and confusion. Who was attacking? Where would it end? All US planes were grounded, in an extraordinary measure of fear.

At first, the toll from the Twin Towers appeared massive. I remember asking Conor O'Clery how many people could have been killed, and he said, "Well, about 50,000 people work there ..." We appeared to be looking at an open-ended disaster.

In the Dublin newsroom, it was the ultimate challenge, in the last days of traditional newspaper culture, the product published at a fixed time, having to tell the story. No continual updates online as the main conduit.

For our newspaper, The Irish Times, the disaster came at a time when our editor, Conor Brady, was out of the country. And remember, just 20 years ago, communication was not universal and instant as it is now, even though mobile phones and the internet were well established. When a decision was taken in Dublin not to publish the paper on September 14 as a mark of respect, Brady let it be known he was horrified with what he saw as an abdication of the classic newspaper responsibility, to report and reflect the events of the day, no matter how terrible.

911 was shocking, but it showed many people at their best in their jobs. On this 20^th anniversary, we know the world did change, and yet, as the Taliban forms its government in Kabul, you know the old truth that the more things change …

My fundamental feeling  is sympathy and sorrow with the families and friends of the 2,996 people who perished on that terrible day, and the thousands more whose injuries changed the course of their lives.