It is difficult to write without emotion about this week's events in the United States. The scale of this tragedy, the total inhumanity of the manner in which it was carried out, and the extent to which almost all of the vast number of casualties were fatal, mark this out from anything that has gone before during many decades of international terrorism. The people of the US have received a huge wave of sympathy from almost every part of the world.
The scale of the reaction in Ireland has reflected the closeness of our human and social contacts with the US. Other countries may have closer political relations with the US than we have, or are more closely engaged in terms of trade and investment with it than we are - although in terms of inward US investment we are, of course uniquely involved with that country. And some other states may also identify more readily than we do with American attitudes on social issues. But no other country has made such a huge investment of its people in the US, or has such a strong sense of human involvement with that country.
All this has been reflected in the extraordinary expression of Irish grief and solidarity that we have seen culminating in yesterday's nationwide day of mourning, which effectively closed down commercial and social activities throughout the State in a quite unprecedented way.
The eventual repercussions - economic and military - of these appalling events are at this stage unknowable. But already they have given rise to deep concern at a global level.
At the very least, these events seem likely to intensify the recession in the US that was already well under way before this happened - with obvious consequences for the rest of the world, including Ireland. How great these economic repercussions will be we cannot now know. Nor can we at present guess just how successful, or otherwise, governments and central banks will be in counteracting the negative effects of what happened last Tuesday.
On the military side, initial fears that understandable public anger in the US might push its government in the direction of unilateral action were very quickly eased by the obvious concern of the American government to internationalise the issue through the United Nations Security Council and NATO.
On the one hand, this must have reflected a recognition of the wisdom of drawing on the quite extraordinary wave of sympathy for the US that this tragedy instantly evoked. On the other hand, it may well also have been influenced by a concern on the part of the US government to invoke this international support as a means of heading off some of the - eminently understandable - pressure from its own public opinion for hasty, ill-considered retaliatory action.
For its part, the global community acted with extraordinary speed to give effect to this process of internationalising the issue. With rare unanimity the Security Council has voted a most supportive resolution, expressing its readiness to take all necessary steps to respond to these terrorist attacks. And NATO members were clearly glad to invoke Article 5 at the instigation of the US, treating this attack as an act of war requiring joint action by all, in defence of its member which had been attacked. then, on Thursday, Russia sought a joint role with NATO in the handling of the issue.
Clearly the hope is that this solidarity will help to head off American popular demand for an attack on all the countries that over the years have been suspected of tolerance of anti-US terrorism, and to concentrate any military action against targets in respect of which clear evidence exists that they were actually engaged with the authors of these terrible atrocities.
During these days, anti-American voices in Ireland have been notably silent. It should not be assumed that as events develop they will remain so. Even if military action is in fact to be confined to targets justified by the evidence, and even if it commands the support of the wider international community, including Russia - and we must hope that this will in fact be the case - we must be prepared for a recrudescence of the crude anti-Americanism which is a feature of some on the fringes of Irish politics.
These events have provoked some discussion on this side of the Atlantic about the reasons why the US is so hated in parts of the world, most notably in Islamic countries. in the immediate future this question is, perhaps, unlikely to play much of a role in American reflections on these events.
For one of the problems about US foreign policy has been that so much of US opinion is totally focused on the domestic scene. reporting on events outside the US plays a small role in the US media, and what there is of it is often simplistic and shallow. In many areas one can find oneself reading regional papers in which nothing from outside the us is reported.
In these circumstances it is in no way surprising that most Americans are quite unaware of negative attitudes towards their country in other parts of the world and assume that they are seen everywhere else as they see themselves - a simple bastion of freedom and democracy.
Insofar as popular US opinion may occasionally focus momentarily on the Middle East - for example if oil prices jump - most Americans are presented with a view of the situation as one in which a small and friendly democratic state, Israel, is surrounded by unreasoningly hostile terrorist neighbours.
That Israel is occupying Palestinian territories, which it conquered one-third of a century ago, albeit in a defensive war, and that it has consistently rejected UN resolutions calling for it to end this illegal occupation, is something of which I suspect most Americans are totally unaware. Moreover, the fact that, sometimes single-handedly, the US has blocked efforts to bring this occupation to an end and to secure for Palestinians their rights, is I think, also something of which most Americans know nothing.
Of course I know that there is another side to this story. No one with any sense of history, above all that of the 20th century, can begrudge the Jewish people a homeland of their own. moreover, the violence of the reaction that Israel faced following its occupation of the rest of Palestine a third of a century ago, as well as its vulnerability, has made it extraordinarily difficult for it to yield up its conquest.
I am simply concerned here to point out that we cannot expect most American people to understand why so many Arabs and other muslims are so frustrated with the injustice of the Palestinians' fate that they have come to hate the US.
Is it, perhaps, possible that Americans may now be prompted to seek to understand why they have been visited with this almost apocalyptic event, thus coming closer to the outside world, instead of, as some have feared, withdrawing further into themselves?
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie