Children are not victims of terrorism only in the US

TV Watch with Bernie Ni Fhlatharta

It is not that I am hard-hearted or don’t care about the people who died in 9/11, but how many more programmes are going to be made of that incident and how many years are viewers going to be reminded of the atrocity?

I had of course vowed not to watch any more 9/11 programmes, but of course I had to tune in to the one about the children on Wednesday on TV3.

And of course it was heartbreaking to hear the children of fathers and mothers who died in the Twin Towers that day speak of their grief, of their loss and of a future that is missing a parent.

It was, like all the other programmes on the subject, gripping and the footage of the planes crashing into the towers and then seeing them collapse is still a very powerful image.

And of course it is an image that will be shown again and again by the Americans especially who feel particularly victimised by the enemy – whoever that is, and the years have shown that this is interchangeable. Just pop in any Middle Eastern country.

But back to the programme. There were powerful interviews with some of the children. One young girl lost her mother that day and she only started grieving properly a decade afterwards. She felt too angry, too guilty to grieve, to cry, as she didn’t want to appear weak in front of her father and younger brother.

And she herself had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy two years before her mother’s death. Then there were two other families who experienced their teenage children acting out and going out of control. Another reaction to the death of a parent.

One young man said it was even more difficult to move on when the images of that day were repeated on television. It was as if, he said, he saw his father die every time he saw that footage.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.