Young writer, Fergus Dennehy, says his peers have been shocked and saddened by the tragedy in Berkeley this week. But there is also the sense that it could have happened to their friends, family members or even themselves….

What is it about the Berkeley tragedy that has affected the mood of the entire country?

Realistically, many of us have no personal or logical connection to those who sadly lost their lives in the balcony collapse in California, yet almost every single young person that I’ve talked to has been visibly affected by the tragedy.

Why is this?

It’s because we can all relate to it. That feeling that those young students would have felt, going out to America for the summer, with their exams behind them, looking to create memories that would last a lifetime.

That feeling of being young, free, with the world as their oyster. We know that feeling, we’ve felt it many times ourselves.

What scares us young people most, is this feeling that they were just like us, they were just out to celebrate a birthday and have some fun.

It could have been any of us that had decided to go on this J1, that could have been persuaded to go to the 21st that night, that decided to go out on the balcony in those moments.

Anyone of us could have suffered the tragic fate of those six young people who died and the seven who were injured.

We can all imagine the fear and pain that our own parents would go through if it had been us involved. The anxiety that your mother would feel on the sixth ring of your phone, with no answer yet, is an image that I don’t like to dwell on.

We’re Irish, so we’re imbued with an innate sense that, no matter where we go in the world, we are connected by this shared sense of pride in our heritage.

The fact that we have lost six of our own hurts us deeply.

RIP Ashley, Olivia, Eimear, Eoghan, Niccolai and Lorcan.

• This article originally appeared on Fergus Dennehy’s blog here