A group of Irish fire fighters due to travel to New York yesterday have postponed their visit because of a dispute by the International Association of Fire Fighters with Mayor Giuliani over reducing the numbers of fire fighters working at the site of the World Trade Centre.
Fire fighters in New York and elsewhere have accused the mayor of being "insensitive and callous" in his actions and firemen here have been highly critical of the scaling down.
Some 25 fire fighters from Dublin, Cork, Sligo, Limerick, Galway, Drogheda and Waterford and other parts of the country along with retained (part-time) colleagues were to have visited fire stations in New York and the Ground Zero site in Manhattan.
On Sunday the Irish contingent were to have attended a memorial service with up to 75,000 other fire fighters from all over the world.
Last Thursday however, the memorial service was called off.
The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) cited "resentment among widows and New York fire fighters about the city's arbitrary decision to reduce the numbers working in ground zero by as much as three quarters as well as "over-reaction" by the police commissioner to a fire fighter at a rally in New York as reasons for postponing the service.
The bodies of 240 fire fighters are still missing in the rubble along with thousands of civilians and police officers and the IAFF does not want them "dumped with debris in a Staten Island landfill," its president Mr Harold Schaitberger said.
Scaling down the recovery has gone against a long-standing tradition in the New York fire service dating back 200 years as it has limited their ability to recover the bodies of their fallen brothers.
Spokespersons for fire fighters here said they readily agreed to call off the visit.
"We are in complete solidarity with our New York colleagues," Mr Noel Heaney a spokesperson for firemen in Cork said.
Fire fighters in Ireland have particularly close relations with their colleagues in New York, he added.
It will be January at least before the visit is re-scheduled, the chairman of the national committee here has indicated.
"We are going to wait now until a new Lord Mayor is elected, a new Chief Fire Officer is put in place and to allow for further excavation to retrieve bodies," Mr Brian Murray, the Chairman of the Fire Fighters National Committee said yesterday. Mayor Giuliani was going against his own previously stated policy of excavating the site until all bodies were retrieved, Mr Murray said.
A fund-raising concert for the families of New York fire fighters lost on September 11th takes place in Dublin at the Fire Brigade Club in Parnell Square on Sunday night.