about the 9/11 attacks.
"I just don't," she says, "I want my own memories of it."
The Dublin-born playwright, who moved to the US in 1969, was living in
the shadows of the Twin Towers in 2001 - just three blocks north on
Greenwich Street.
She can recall going for a jog that morning, passing the flow of people
coming off ferries and out of subways on their way to work in the World
Trade Centre.
Many of them would never go home.
She was in the elevator of her building when the first plane struck, but
was out in the street with her partner and neighbours as the second
tower was hit.
"It was an explosion of orange. It was insane." she recalls.
"There was no frame to this experience. This was not a TV show. Time
compressed and expanded. There was no end. There was no narrative. I
remember the fear."
An overheard conversation sticks out in her mind - between a young
mother and her five year old child.
The boy pointed up and said: 'Somebody jumped'.
The mother said, 'No they didn't. It's just glass'.
Then, later when people were jumping, the boy said: 'Those buildings
could fall'.
The mother looked at her son, and reassured him: 'No they couldn't."
Like everyone else in Lower Manhattan that day, Honor was evacuated from
her home.
She remembers returning to the street where she lived the next day.
"It was like Dinosaur World. I mean, the cars were all burnt. There were
grey carcasses of cars, hundreds of them, lining Church St with ash all
over them."
Soon it became clear that they had lost people in their neighborhood,
and she noticed the loss in peculiar ways.
The normally-busy gym on her street was emptier, for example.
She plans to leave New York for the anniversary - she's going to
Pennsylvania for the weekend.
"It just hurts too much still," she says, "I can't stand sentiment."
"I don't talk about this with people. This is not something that I open
up about."
Maurice Landers, director of Failte 32, which helps new Irish immigrants
to the US, was working in Midtown when the Towers collapsed.
His first instinct, like many others, was to make his way downtown to
see if he could help.
"They were organizing volunteers, next to the courthouses, to go on
buses into the site to tend to the wounded," says Landers.
"They gave us cloths to wrap around any wounds, gave us face masks and
gloves.
"I went on one of the buses which drove through the plume of smoke that
covered the area but by the time we arrived near the site, the Army
Reserves were directing everyone away from the area.
"They knew the third building was going to fall, and were not going to
put untrained volunteers in amongst the rubble."
By then it was clear there would be few survivors.
"It was ominous to see one medical centre that had prepared for the
arrival of the wounded by erecting a canopy outside the main entrance,
housing empty stretchers and other medical equipment.
"Staff were just waiting in hope to treat people but probably realized
that no one was coming at that stage. A sad day."
Prominent Irish-American radio host Adrian Flannelly had just finished a
broadcast when news broke that the terrorists had struck.
His thoughts immediately turned to his two daughters who worked in Lower
Manhattan.
One, Eileen, had phoned him moments earlier.
She had been on a bus, about four blocks from the Twin Towers, when the
impact of the first plane knocked the vehicle on its side.
At the time, Flannelly was unaware of how serious the attacks were, and
thought his daughter was just being a drama queen.
Now, he realized the enormity of what was unfolding.
It would be 36 hours before he heard from Eileen again, and a full three
days before he made contact with his other daughter Kathleen who worked
in the area to confirm she was safe.
"It was horrific. It was awful," he says, "The uncertainty of it all."
"Take the scene: no subway, no buses, the city in lockdown. No
communications. Cellphones down. There were people who didn't hear from
their kids for ten days. This was not unusual."
Flannelly was working as an Irish community liaison officer for New
York's mayor Rudy Giuliani at the time.
In the days the followed, it soon emerged that the cops, fireman and
other first responders who died were predominantly Irish-American.
"It seemed as each day went by that it was a woefully lob-sided
percentage of the fatalities," he said.
"We still know many people who were injured, some of them quite
severely. I don't think history will even record it. Those that were
merely hurt didn't even count."
Flannelly has been in the US since 1959, and says Nine Eleven has
changed the country.
Americans feel less safe.
"That's never coming back," he says.
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