If that’s the worst they can do, is the war on terror being won?

LAST week I had an interesting exchange of emails with two college mates of mine who live in London.

They got their first jobs there and have since settled there, married there, and have families there.

Unlike the thousands of emigrants of our generation who returned to live in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger boom, they both have stayed on in London.

While they appreciate they owe England much, and realise for example that their children's primary identity is likely to be English, they themselves will always be Irish. Interestingly, they both say, however, that while they will never be English, they are Londoners and proud of it.

The email thread opened early on Thursday afternoon. The first exchanges were similar to thousands of other emails which bounced across the Irish Sea after news of the bombings broke they just wanted to let everyone know that they and all belonging to them were safe.

Over the course of the following days they used the same thread to record some interesting close-up observations on the reactions of their fellow Londoners to the bombing atrocities.

Like them I watched much of the wall-to-wall coverage of the event in the hours and days that followed.

One of the most interesting discussions I came across was late on Thursday night itself on the BBC's political review programme, This Week, where the panel, as always, included the former Conservative minister, Michael Portillo.

He argued that in many ways the four bombings in London that morning represented a failure for the terrorists rather than a success.

While the bombings were obviously horrific events, especially for those directly affected and those close to them, they were also obviously relatively minor by comparison to the 9/11 bombings in New York and Washington in 2001.

Portillo argued that as there had not been a 'spectacular' on the 9/11 scale anywhere in the world since, and as the bombing in London, when it did come, was relatively small scale, the war on terror was actually being won.

His argument, essentially, was that it is impossible in an open, modern society and economy to remove all opportunities for attacks of this nature once terrorists are intent on committing them and especially when they are prepared to commit suicide in order to effect their terror.

However, it is possible by preventative measures and a calm, co-ordinated response to atrocities to contain the impact of terrorism, and if you are containing it, you are winning.

The other point made by Portillo was that the reaction of Londoners to the bombings would render the attack even less effective.

Portillo, whose father was Spanish, was asked for the same TV programme to travel to Spain after the Madrid bombings last year.

He said what he found was that, while there had been marches and public trauma there in the days after the bombing, the overwhelming majority of Spaniards had returned to relatively unscathed lives, albeit under a new government, within a fortnight or so.

Last Thursday night Portillo predicted (accurately, as it turned out) that, even in the days immediately following, there would not be anything on the same scale of emotional outpouring in London in response to the bombs there.

In the week since, the points made by Portillo have been made by a number of other commentators in Britain. For example, Simon Hoggart, in The Guardian on Saturday, wrote a piece along the lines, 'is that it is that the best you terrorists can do?'

However, the true impact of what Portillo had to say was that he was brave enough to run the risk of being misinterpreted and being regarded perhaps as insensitive by making these points on national television just 12 hours or so after the attacks.

On Friday morning I added a summary of Portillo's comments to my email thread with my London pals and asked them what they thought of what he had to say?

I added my own observation. In 1997 the death of one woman, Princess Diana, in a car accident, had brought London to a physical and psychological standstill for a week and had emptied the contents of the city's florists onto railings all over the city and had brought hundred of thousands onto to the streets to weep.

I asked them whether they thought it strange therefore that, apart from relatively small shrines at the three tube stations and the site of the bus bombing, there had been no mass outpouring of emotion in London in response to Thursday's events.

WITHIN minutes of sending that instalment on the email, one of my London-based pals was on the phone in an excitable state. He said he had just read it to his office colleagues and they were horrified at the point made in the email.

As I began to make apologies for causing offence at this sensitive time for Londoners, he dissuaded me saying that, on the contrary, what had horrified his colleagues was how accurate it was, and how muted their response to the event had been.

They were all being told it was part of supposed traditional London stoicism but, in fact, many were wondering whether it was really because of the relatively small scale of the attack and the fact that they had been expected something like it (or indeed much worse) before now.

Some even wondered whether, after the dramatic events of 9/11, they were now immune to being terrorised by terrorism on a lesser scale.

My other London pal came back by email arguing that, in fact, my comparison with the reaction to the death of Diana was a bit trite since that was the death of an icon and therefore on a different scale.

Instead he felt it more useful to contrast the near hysterical reaction among the British public to the murder of Jessica Hunter and Holly Wells two summers ago with the relatively muted reaction in Britain to the massacre at a Russian school last year, and particularly with the low-scale reaction to the recent killing of a young black girl by relatives who claimed she was a witch.

He argued that the emotional engagement of a population with an event is always determined by proximity to it. It is not, or not only, a question of geographic proximity but one of cultural affinity and other similarities to the victim or circumstances. People relate to the killing of people like them, or children like theirs.

These were just some of the initial observations from these two Irish Londoners on the dramatic events that befell their city last week. I felt they were worth sharing. No more than anyone else, they don't have all the answers but, like all Londoners, they are struggling to make sense of the bombings and their aftermath.

Yesterday they told me the revelation that last Thursday's atrocities were the work of home-grown suicide bombers appeared to have shocked Londoners more than the initial impact of the bombings itself.

Somewhat innocently, many of their English friends and colleagues had assumed, or hoped, that London had been visited by terrorism on tour from the Middle East. There is now a sense among Londoners that the further the investigation into the bombings progresses, the more disturbing it will prove to be.