Forty shades of yellow

One year on from the Twin Towers tragedy, Irish Voice founder, author and Irish-American authority Niall O’Dowd has slammed Ireland’s neutrality status and anti-American media bias throughout the aftermath of September 11.

“It was all this anti-American consensus that was dominating the media,” he says. “It was all like, ‘Okay, we know best, we’ve got all this moral superiority’ bullshit. What moral superiority? When did Ireland ever take a stand on anything? How good does it look now that we were neutral about Hitler? We’re the guys who went to Hitler’s funeral. You can’t lecture if you’re in the middle. ‘The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis’ – that’s Dante I think.”

O’Dowd was speaking to hotpress on the publicity campaign for his new book Fire In The Morning, based on the stories and testimonies of a number of Irish American survivors of the World Trade Centre attacks.

“I wrote a piece in the Irish Times which was quite controversial at the time, making a lot of points about what I felt was initially a wonderful response in Ireland to the actual event,” he says, “but then there was a kind of cosy consensus in this country of, ‘If it’s American I’m against it’, right across the board. I felt that people didn’t have any sense at all of the impact of the 3000 deaths on Americans and essentially the doctrine that you have to defend yourself.

“America did not provoke the war. And when I meet someone who’s able to defend the Taliban I’ll see the error of my ways, but this notion that somehow there was a legitimate regime in Afghanistan that just happened to blunder into this is complete nonsense. They were the most fundamentalist anti-women, anti-everything regime. It was absolutely clear when the troops came into Kabul that they were very widely accepted by the people.”

When asked for his views on Vincent Browne’s opinion pieces on the subject in the Irish Times, O’Dowd referred to them as “ravings”, saying, “Vincent is one of those people who if it’s American he’s against it. I really think there’s a cosy liberal consensus because this country never gets asked the tough questions.”

What kind of tough questions?

“Where do you stand on Afghanistan, where do you stand on Hitler, where do you stand on anything. You don’t stand anywhere; you’re kind of sitting there on the fence saying, ‘This is terrible’. That’s very easy to do. Countries like Ireland can have an impact far beyond their size. The anti-Americanism had quite an impact on a lot of Irish-Americans in the wake of September 11; I think they felt very surprised. The black-and-white nature of that event is rare in world history in my opinion, it’s nearly always grey in terms of solving a lot of these problems, but that particular problem was absolutely stark. The city was paralysed, 3000 totally innocent people were killed, what are you gonna do? Nobody ever came up with a good reason why we shouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan.

“The irony is the fact that if America opened its borders tomorrow, for all the hatred, I think half the people on earth would want to get in there. There’s a visa lottery going on now for American Green cards between October and November, and I guarantee you thousands and thousands of Irish people will apply for that because there’s a fundamental reality that it’s been a great country for immigrants.”

Fire In The Morning is essentially a commemoration of 17 of the estimated 1000 Irish-Americans who died last September. To give some idea of the remarkable nature of these stories, the reader need look no further than that of 47-year old software company owner Ron Clifford, who managed to escape from the World Trade Centre only to later discover that his sister Ruth was on board United Flight 175 which crashed into the south tower.

“It’s 17 people’s stories, where they were on the day and what happened to them,” the author says. “They were very ordinary people caught in an extraordinary situation, and they’re so much more interesting than reading another profile of Arnold Schwartznegger or someone.”

When asked to comment on how 9/11 impacted on Irish American support for Sinn Fein and the IRA, O’Dowd said, “I think Sinn Fein were very, very lucky that the peace process was underway and they were in government. I mean the problem of Colombia was very damaging for them because of September 11. Colombia is within the American sphere of influence and to be fucking around down there is really stupid and to say otherwise would be really naïve. But Sinn Fein know another incident like Colombia would really be the end for them.”

Are there any more such skeletons in the closet that he’s aware of?

“If you’d asked me about Colombia I would’ve said the whole notion of it was ridiculous, so unfortunately I can’t guarantee that they haven’t gone and done something twice as stupid. But I doubt it.”

Despite his feelings on how the Bush administration handled itself in Afghanistan, O’Dowd remains unequivocally opposed to its plans to attack Iraq, and contends that many Americans feel the same way.

“Iraq is a totally different case,” he says. “I would defend to the hilt everything that Bush did in Afghanistan and I would oppose to the hilt everything he’s trying to do in Iraq. You won’t find me defending pre-emptive strikes in countries where there is absolutely no evidence saying that Hussein had anything to do with 9/11.

“No American president has ever gone to war with the American people divided, and right now the people are divided. You ask people now and they’ll say, ‘The problem with America is we’ve become used to a kind of video game war where we drop these Smart bombs and a couple of Americans die and maybe that’s it’. But if Saddam decided suddenly to make it a guerrilla war in the cities using civilians as shields like what happened in Somalia – the worst-case scenario for the Americans – America would be in very deep trouble. I predict Bush will destroy his presidency if he goes to war with Iraq because people don’t want it.”