By Georgina Brennan

EVEN though his friends call him a hero, Steve McSweeney, 32, said his only motivation for running into the rescue efforts of September 11 was his family.

“That’s all I thought about, my family,” says the carpenter from Tralee, Co. Kerry who lives in Queens. “I imagined everyone down there trapped had a family too. So I had to help them.”

McSweeney, a carpenter up on a roof at Broadway and Lafayette, was rooted to the slates he was installing as he watched a plane flying right into the World Trade Center. “I shut the job down right away and went down to help,” says McSweeney, who has lived in the U.S. for eight years.

“We raced down to the site and reported to volunteer. As I ran down there was dust everywhere. All I remember is that people were running away. I gave some of my shirt to a woman for her mouth. You couldn’t breathe.”

Almost three weeks later, McSweeney was still there, standing in the same clothes, sleeping outdoors and working round the clock.

“You were just there trying to find survivors. I snuck in to help and joined the bucket brigade.”

He never once thought about the fact that he was illegal. Neither did anybody else.

“Nobody asked me for papers,” says McSweeney, who helped people get out of the rubble and dust.

McSweeney had been in similar situations before. He knew what to do. Back home in Tralee, before he came to America to make a better life for himself, McSweeeny was a member of the voluntary search-and-rescue unit.

It came in useful at Ground Zero. “Basically on the bucket crew, we removed a body, an arm, things like that. You would be going through the rubble, there was a lot of rubble, you would be going through it hoping to find someone alive, but then you might find a body and you would have to seal off the area and get the firemen to remove it. Especially if there was a heavy beam over it.”

McSweeney an says he spent nights in the volunteer beds at Chelsea Piers and credits adrenaline with his ability to keep going.

“There were about 300 Irish people working down there. I met Brian McKenna and Micheal Corridan (all three of them later got involved with the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform) there. All the lads that worked with me worked day and night. Some of them had wives and kids. But they are all gone back to Ireland now.”

But McSweeney soldiered on. He even injured his arm but kept working in the filth and dust and almost lost it.

“I was nervous about seeking medical attention on it. It got infected and I had to go to a medical center. The next thing, my whole arm swelled up. I went to a hospital where they operated on it. They said if I had left it another day I would have lost my arm.”

Still nobody asked about McSweeney’s papers. Now, he needs to get his heart monitored after the strain he put on it during his heroic efforts. But it was worth it.

After the rescue efforts were shut down and it turned into a recovery operation, McSweeney went home. In the months after an undocumented Irishman from Belfast was given a green card for his heroics on September 11. It never occurred to McSweeney to seek one.

“I just thought about embracing my family when I walked off that site. And I couldn’t. I never thought about getting a green card,” he says.

“Even when Bush came down to speak to us and I was there, a green card was the last thing on my mind. I just thought, ‘Can I save someone?’”

Now five years have passed and McSweeney, who has a Canadian girlfriend and a business of his own, is missing home. That’s why he joined ILIR.

“Every year it comes up to the anniversary of September 11 and we are told the immigration issue will be addressed. But it hasn’t been. I was sick of sitting back waiting,” he says.

“I want to be able to travel. This is our one chance to get the message across that we are not here to live off America, but to live right.”

McSweeney says the way immigrants have been treated in the past five years, a backlash for terrorist actions, makes him angry.

“Immigrants have contributed so much to America. I think America is secure in the best way it knows. We are not a threat. I hope this is the year we get that message across.”