It was out of desperation, she admits, that Adi Roche, the founder and public face of the Chernobyl Children's Project International blurted out on a radio interview on RTE's News at One during Christmas week that if necessary she would sell her house to alleviate the funding difficulties that one of the country's best-known charities was being squeezed with, as a consequence of the recession.

The interview was broadcast while her husband Sean Dunne, having opted for early retirement from his teaching post at the CBS Secondary School in Cork, was saying farewell to his colleagues, prompting them to suggest that they might need to hold another collection for the couple.

Adi says that she would have sold the house if she had to - “it's only bricks and mortar” - but her unflinching belief in the innate goodness of people meant that the roof over her head was never likely to be removed.

The radio interview was conducted over the 'phone in the arrivals hall of Dublin Airport, as she waited to greet a large contingent of children from Belarus who were spending Christmas with families throughout Ireland. For the next hour or two people who either heard or were made aware of the interview approached her with donations in different currencies amounting to j700.

When she returned home to Cork that night an old age pensioner had pushed their live savings of j1,500 through her letterbox. The day proved a humbling experience. “I didn't even know who they were. I get a lump in my throat thinking about it”, she says.

That remark about selling her house might have surprised many but not those who know this quite remarkable woman. For the past 24 years she has worked tirelessly to provide humanitarian aid to the 3-4 million children in Belarus, Western Russia and Ukraine that the United Nations recognises as affected by the world's worst nuclear disaster, which occurred at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986.

Under her leadership, the Chernobyl Children’s Project International has initiated 16 aid programmes and delivered direct and indirect medical and humanitarian aid valued at over €80m to the areas most affected by the nuclear disaster.

INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION

Her efforts on behalf of these children and a thorough understanding of the Chernobyl accident aftermath have brought her international recognition, while the Chernobyl Children’s Project International has received official charitable status in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Belarus and the United States.

Hers is an amazing journey that has taken Adi Roche from her childhood home in Western Park, Clonmel to the hallowed halls of the United Nations in Geneva and New York.

Despite her work on behalf of the Chernobyl children, she claims there's nothing altruistic in her involvement with the Project, one to which she has devoted her life.