THE world changed forever through the 9/11 catastrophes in the United States, 25 years ago this Friday, with the full scale of the consequences still unfolding internationally and impossible to finally calculate.

While almost 3,000 people died almost immediately in the devastation after four airliners were hijacked by the extremist Muslim group al-Qaeda, detailed academic studies suggest that the number of fatalities recorded during the subsequent conflicts as part of what the US administration defined as a global war on terror is approaching five million.

It remains difficult to convey the sense of disbelief on September 11 2001 as it began to emerge that US territory was under serious and coordinated attack effectively for the first time since the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii six decades previously.

Early media reports that a plane of unspecified size had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York seemed to indicate a tragic accident until the South Tower was identically targeted just over 15 minutes later, and two more passenger jets then crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, within an hour.

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Ireland was obviously on the periphery of those appalling........

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