A tribute to those Irish Americans we lost on 9/11

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The final plane to be hijacked that morning was United Airlines Flight 93. Because its passengers learned by cell phone that the morning's previous hijackings were suicide runs, they obviously deduced there was nothing to lose from being brave.



As Flight 93 rumbled through rural Pennsylvania, passenger Thomas Burnett spoke to his wife in California. "I know we're all going to die," said Burnett, a 38-year-old father of three. "There's three of us who are going to do something about it."



By nature of the phone call to his wife, then, Burnett was among the lucky ones. 



With so few survivors pulled from the ruins, and hospitals across New York relatively empty because the dead so outnumbered the physically wounded, there were so many who never got the chance to say goodbye, never got the chance to say "I love you." 



Martin Coughlan also got to make that final phone call. Shortly after 9 a.m., the 53-year-old carpenter from Cappawhite, County Tipperary, managed to call home from his jobsite on the 96th floor of Tower One. 



"There's been a bomb in the building," Coughlin told his wife, "but I'm OK, and tell the four girls I'll be home for dinner." Many days later, Coughlan's remains were found. 



106 stories from safety, Eamon McEneaney also called his wife. The 46-year-old vice-president at Cantor Fitzgerald was a heralded survivor of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, when he calmly covered the mouths of co-workers with wet towels and led human chains down the stairs. 



On September 11, the father-of-four left a message at his wife's office: a plane had hit the building, he was on the way out, and he loved her. McEneaney never made it out.



Unlike McEneaney, John O'Neill managed to escape. The 50-year-old former FBI man had been named the Trade Center's Director of Security just two weeks before.



He made it from the 34th floor to the street, from where he called his son to report that he was safe. 



Then O'Neill re-entered one of the Towers, joining the human sacrifice that was under way in the name of evacuating others. 



In Spring Lake, New Jersey, the McAlarys leapt for joy when their son and brother Bryan phoned to say he had escaped unharmed from his Trade Center office.

They were soon horrified to learn that Bryan's older brother James, a 42-year-old broker, was in the Trade Center that day for a sales meeting. "Jimmy Mac," as he was known to all, never came home.

The McAlarys were but one of many sets of brothers at the scene that day. 


At the base of the Towers, Michael Moran of Rescue 3 spoke by cell phone with his big brother John, a 43-year-old Battalion Chief. They were brothers by blood and “brothers” by profession, among the fraternity of the FDNY. 



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