TERRORISM REVERBERATES IN N. IRELAND

Just a little more than a month ago, I was up in the World Trade Center towers looking out at Manhattan. To see them disappear in a waterfall of concrete, dust and bodies is like seeing your past disappear.

I had been there and I've seen how many tourists visit. They come from every corner of the world, old and young. It's just horrible to think of the parents who have lost their children and the children who don't have mothers or fathers anymore.

It's been 13 years since I was born. A lot has happened, but this is the biggest event in history since then.

There have been some positive things, and some negative things. Not long after I was born, the Berlin Wall came down, then there was the release of South Africa's Nelson Mandela from prison and, of course, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Those were good things in most people's eyes.

Then there were the bad things. The genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Gulf War were all awful catastrophes that have happened in my lifetime. At the time, the Omagh bomb seemed disastrous.

But yesterday, a major event in history shook the world a lot more than young people might have thought. This morning my friend came rushing up to me in the playground and told me in a deeply worried voice how she'd be heartbroken if they sent her father to war if this act of terrorism began World War III. This is a girl who usually worries about her nail polish cracking off or her hair being lopsided.

I was shocked at how seriously a lot of my school friends had been taking the events; they really understood what was going on. Later in English class, we discussed the attack on the World Trade Center twin towers with our teacher. We talked over how we would feel if Northern Ireland were under terrorist attack. Suddenly, all our teen-age worries disappeared. People on the other side of the world were lying dead under piles of concrete and rubble, or even worse, people were lying there waiting to die.

People deal with tragedy in different ways. At school, some people were joking about how people were (rappelling) down the skyscraper with toilet paper. Most people laughed, but one girl burst into tears. Most people thought she was being unreasonable because she had no relations or friends in New York, but I understand that she was feeling the pain of the victims.

Young people here have been affected by this tragedy. Some have lost friends or relatives; others, like me, have not heard from aunts and uncles living in New York.

When I found out about the attack, I was in shock for a long time. Part of me, of course, empathizes with the ordinary families who have lost their nearest and dearest, but I have to reluctantly admit that I feel such an attack was only a matter of time in coming.

America's hands have been soiled with blood from nearly every corner of the world. This does not mean that innocent people should die, suffocating under tons of debris and rubble or crashing to their deaths on a plane. But we can't ignore the truth that successive U.S. governments have gained a multitude of enemies.

Now is not the time to judge but instead learn that lives, whether they are Palestinian, Bosnian, Indian, American, Irish, French or whatever, are all of equal value. Some young people don't realize how heavily they may be affected by this. If worse comes to worst, and World War III starts, the U.K. and Ireland could be involved.

All we can do is listen and wait for George Bush's response, and hope that it doesn't start a "You hit me so I'll hit you back" situation like we have here.

Editor's note: The Omagh car bomb, which killed 29 innocent civilians, occurred on Aug. 15, 1998, 13 weeks after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Omagh, a town of nearly 18,000, is 70 miles west of Belfast.

Note to readers

Y-Press and Children's Express (U.K.) have long been partners in their missions of giving youths a voice through journalism. Like Y-Press, CE-UK is a nonprofit program of learning through journalism for people younger than 18. It maintains seven bureaus in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and its reporters have published more than 350 stories in five years in a variety of local and national newspapers, as well as appearing on radio and television programs.

Recently, CE's Belfast bureau reporter Orlaith Graham Wood, 13, offered a personal perspective on the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. This essay was first published Sept. 13 in the News Letter in Northern Ireland.