Liam Neeson speaks in public for first time since Natasha's tragic death

Receiving honorary degree, Irish actor talks about life's lessons and 'graduation' after 38 years

Then, in January 1972 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday -- one of the most violent days of The Troubles when 14 unarmed civilians were killed in Derry by a British paratrooper regiment -- Neeson suddenly woke up to a new reality .

“I’d go into my morning classes and was surprised to find them largely empty. Only two or three other students in my physics lecture hall. Leaving the building after class and walking back to the halls of residence, I was surrounded by a throng of about a hundred angry students who shouted at me, called me a scab. They were protesting against the Bloody Sunday killings, which had happened the day before, and were staging a university-wide strike.

"I had been totally unaware of the events the day before, totally unaware of the students’ strike, and almost totally unaware of the larger grim struggle that was going on in Ireland.

‘It was an experience that shook me deeply, in complicated ways. But the message I took then was, 'Boy, you’ve got to wake up. Get moving. You’ve got to get going.'

"It came to me maybe with more of a short, sharp shock than it does to most,” he said.

"But in a way, I think it is a message that a university always gives its students in the end: I got on with my life, and I’m still getting on."

He said he took the same message from the role he first played onstage in Brian Friel’s "Philadelphia Here I Come,” which he called "a play about the need to get on with your life, of the wrench of departure that comes with that need."

At the end of his speech, Neeson choked up, barely able to get out his last line. But the accomplished actor came through:

" I’m a deeply honored and humbled man from Ballymena tonight."

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Nster.com