Next Friday, the first anniversary of the 7 July London bombings, will see Ciaran Cassidy's parents revisit the day their son never came home. The 22-year-old was among 52 people killed when four suicide bombers set off bombs on London's transport system during the morning rush hour a year ago next weekend.

"I wish the anniversary was all over with.

This is an awful time altogether as it is bringing it all back, " Ciaran's father Sean told the Sunday Tribune last week. "I still remember everything that happened on that day as if it was yesterday."

Ciaran Cassidy used to catch the Piccadilly line tube at Finsbury Park each morning around 8.25am, which would deliver him to Holborn. From there, he would walk to his work in a stationery shop in Chancery Lane in the centre of London.

On 7 July last year, Sean Cassidy, who is originally from Swanlinbar, Co Cavan, went off to his job as a postman for the Royal Mail a few hours before his wife Veronica and son Ciaran left for work.

"I was just leaving the office to go out on my post round when I heard about the bombs, " he explains. "After we heard about the bombs at the tube station, we were trying to contact Ciaran that morning but there was no answer from his mobile phone.

I contacted his work and his boss said that he had not arrived at work that day. Even at that stage we thought that he was still trapped in the tube, as many people were, and we assumed he would get out okay.

"But he never came home. The phone never rang. We waited for four days before the police called to the door to give us official confirmation that Ciaran was dead."

Next Friday at 11.30am, Sean, his wife Veronica and their 27-year-old daughter Lisa will go to Holborn tube station to see a plaque unveiled in honour of their son and the other people who had their lives torn apart by the bomb. "A book documenting people's memories of the day will also be launched on Friday and there will be a twominute silence held across Britain at noon, " said Sean. "We are also going to attend a memorial event in Regent's Park at 6pm."

This time last year Ciaran Cassidy was saving up to travel the world. He had got enough money together to go to Australia and had planned to fly off by the end of the summer. Instead his young life came to a tragic end some time after 8.50am on 7 July last year.

A huge Arsenal football fan, Sean recalled how Ciaran always went to Highbury to watch games as often as he could. "I have a lot of memories of him flooding back now when the World Cup is on, " he says. "As we were both Arsenal fans, it was very tough to sit and watch this year's Champions League final without him."

Sean Cassidy had emigrated to London in the early 1970s, like so many young Irish people in search of work. There he met his future wife Veronica Farry, a nurse from Enniskillen, who had also left Ireland in search of a better life.

From either side of the Irish border, neither had lived far from the conflict in Northern Ireland, which followed them across the Irish Sea to London for a time.

Sean recalled, "For many years we saw a lot of bombs go off in London with the IRA's bombing campaign from the 1970s up to the early 1990s. But by 2005 we never thought that the bombs would return to the streets of London."

As Friday's anniversary approaches, the Cassidy family are bracing themselves for a return to their darkest hour. "Even to this day, I still find it difficult to sleep at night as I keep thinking about the day the bombs went off, " said Sean. "But we are just trying to carry on with our lives. We never stop thinking about Ciaran but we just have to keep going."